[HN Gopher] All Circuits Are Busy Now: The 1990 AT&T Long Distan...
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-08-30 23:00 UTC)