phkahler's addendum should be painfully familiar to many:
> Contrary to what that link says, the software was not thoroughly tested. Normal testing was bypassed - per management request after a small code change.
> On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.
> This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.
> Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.
Interestingly enough, this was initially blamed on the Legion of Doom hacker group:
It was a frightening outage that rang alarm bells in more places than just AT&T headquarters. Months earlier, the Secret Service had arrested a 16-year-old hacker nicknamed Fry Guy who had told them, under interrogation, that a hacker gang he was associated with had been planning to crash the system on a national holiday.
That gang, the Legion of Doom, was suddenly on the law enforcement radar screen in a big way. But they weren’t alone. The Texas-centric group was in the midst of an online feud with a New York-based rival, the Masters of Deception. LOD and MOD, as they were known, were at each others throats and the battleground happened to run through the phone switches and computer systems of America.
"Company executives said the malfuction occurred in a program at a giant computer switching station in the New York metropolitan area, causing the computer to send out alarm messages to other switching stations."
Interesting to see MCI taking the opportunity to talk about backup providers.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323402
phkahler's addendum should be painfully familiar to many:
> Contrary to what that link says, the software was not thoroughly tested. Normal testing was bypassed - per management request after a small code change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323904
> On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.
> This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.
> Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/outage#etymonline_v_9966
Here's a Washington Post article from 1977 that uses it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/07/15/b...
And a NY Times article from later in 1977:
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/17/archives/around-the-natio...
It was a frightening outage that rang alarm bells in more places than just AT&T headquarters. Months earlier, the Secret Service had arrested a 16-year-old hacker nicknamed Fry Guy who had told them, under interrogation, that a hacker gang he was associated with had been planning to crash the system on a national holiday.
That gang, the Legion of Doom, was suddenly on the law enforcement radar screen in a big way. But they weren’t alone. The Texas-centric group was in the midst of an online feud with a New York-based rival, the Masters of Deception. LOD and MOD, as they were known, were at each others throats and the battleground happened to run through the phone switches and computer systems of America.
From the article:
https://www.cybersecuritymastersdegree.org/legion-of-doom-vs...
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/17/us/at-t-pinpoints-cause-o...
"Company executives said the malfuction occurred in a program at a giant computer switching station in the New York metropolitan area, causing the computer to send out alarm messages to other switching stations."
Interesting to see MCI taking the opportunity to talk about backup providers.