Monday, August 11, 2008

All the Technology In the World Can’t Defeat Human Stupidity

Wow.  The average IT guy in the private sector would be fired for something like this. 

The Internet outage that shut state Web sites for 90 minutes today was brought on by the state itself.

State computer workers intended to to block some “questionable” communications and inadvertently halted almost all communication, according to Oskar Anderson, the state’s chief information officer.

The action shut down most state Web sites and cut off e-mail for up to 35,000 state workers, Anderson said in a brief statement.

His statement did not describe what material the state was trying to block.

The affected Web sites were not available from about 12:30 to 2 p.m. They included the home pages for state agencies and the Legislature and the Web site that allows people to check court records online.

(6) Comments
Posted by Owen at 1703 hrs
Politics + Politics - Wisconsin + Technology

  1. I’ve been in IT for ten years and I’ve seen people make mistakes—even ones that cause outages—and not be fired.  It really depends on the case.

    Posted by scott on August 11, 2008 at 1801 hrs


  2. Agreed.  But bringing down the entire web presence for a $25 billion organization and shutting down email for two hours would generally result in someone visiting the unemployment line.

    Posted by Owen on August 11, 2008 at 1811 hrs


  3. It makes me wonder whether they have any kind of change control management—and if so, what happened in this case.

    Posted by scott on August 11, 2008 at 1817 hrs


  4. Indeed.  Their staging methodology appears to be flawed.

    Posted by Owen on August 11, 2008 at 1821 hrs


  5. Despite all aq systems & change control schemes bugs will slip through, though it sounds like the change control in this case was pro-forma.

    I don’t recall seeing any commentary about the rogue sysadmin in San Francisco who had locked down a major portion of the City’s network and refused to divulge the passwords to unlock it, however that is now settled.

    Also, I was in a shop and they were hit with a virus brought the whole company down for two days. CIO was out a job after that one.

    A story I heard was some dude thought his program was slow due to volume so he put it in anyway and adjusted the job’s time parm. Next morning he comes in and finds out his code was endlessly looping and his code ate up the department’s CPU budget for the year. He too was out of a job.

    Posted by Marcus Aurelius on August 12, 2008 at 1619 hrs


  6. I agree it.Why because man it self has introduces the systems and machines.With out man any machine cannot do its own work but it rectifies the mistakes.
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    joli
    <a rel=“dofollow”>Wisconsin Treatment Centers </a>

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on August 13, 2008 at 0255 hrs


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