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Jan. 29, 1990
Ghost in The
Machine
The nine-hour
breakdown of AT&T's long-distance telephone network
dramatizes the vulnerability of complex computer systems
everywhere
By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT
The first sign that something
had gone haywire in AT&T's long-distance telephone network
came at 2:25 p.m. last Monday, when the giant map of the U.S.
in the company's operations center in New Jersey began to
light up like a football scoreboard. For reasons still being
investigated, a computer in New York City had come to believe
it was overloaded with calls, and it started to reject them.
Alerted to New York's troubles, dozens of backup computers
across the U.S. automatically switched in to take up the slack
-- only to exhibit the same bizarre symptoms. People trying to
place long-distance calls all...Get
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The complete article is
1323 words long.
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