[HN Gopher] All Circuits Are Busy Now: The 1990 AT&T Long Distan... ___________________________________________________________________ All Circuits Are Busy Now: The 1990 AT&T Long Distance Network Collapse (1995) Author : beagle3 Score : 82 points Date : 2020-08-30 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (users.csc.calpoly.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (users.csc.calpoly.edu) | macintux wrote: | This presumably was pulled from the Level 3 outage discussion. | Relevant comment: | | https://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 | wolfgang42 wrote: | Longer-form article from 1992, which talks about the history of | the phone system and covers this event: | https://stuff.mit.edu/hacker/part1.html | | > 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-08-30 23:00 UTC)