How vulnerable our electronic world really is!
This Tuesday at about noon, I tried to send an email. A dialogue box opened telling me that the smtp server had refused the connection. I gave it a another try. A minute passed and a dialogue box opened telling me that ipostoffice had unexpectedly returned "error code -12263". I'm not heavily tech savvy but when confronted with a problem, I'm willing to take a look at finding a solution. I went to Google and searched on the error code, thinking that might give me an answer. No obvious explanation showed up in the bevy of 'error code' entries. At this point, I noticed that no incoming email had arrived since I'd left the office earlier in the morning. I hit "get messages" and was rewarded with a "ipostoffice is unavailable" message. Frustrated, I backed out of SeaMonkey (the mozilla brower/mail client suite I use) and logged onto my personal laptop where the same thing happened. Since my laptop is a PC and my work computer is a Mac, I was pretty sure that the source of the problem was ATT. I went to the ATT website and logged in. There, in my webmail queue were about 20 incoming messages which hadn't moved to my computer. I tried the "Service Bulletins" button which ATT provides and then tried to go to their Help page. I simply got a spinning wheel until the operation timed out. It was over 24 hours later that the problem cleared up. In the meantime, I had identified that ATT was having a problem through logging into a user newsgroup. ATT didn't have an official explanation to members that I ever saw. Which meant that I (and I'm certain thousands of others) spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot a problem in their mail clients or OS and not being able to get any information to figure it all out.
Once the dust settled I went back to Google out of curiousity and searched on "network failure". That didn't take me anywhere interesting except that there were entries from sites whose users were chronicling failures of the Blackberry and Apple iPhone networks around the country. The posts involved much weeping and gnashing of teeth about lost work productivity.
These small failures, though, pale compared to recent events out in the real world. Pakistan attempted to cut their citizens' access to YouTube last month because it contained anti-islamic content. In the process, the internet authorities managed to crash YouTube on a near global basis. The outage didn't last long, but it suggests the reality which is that the Web can be destabilized more easily than most of us probably imagine. Similar in scope was the incident in which a section of the major fiberoptic cable carrying bandwidth to India and much of Asia was damaged, cutting those regions off from the rest of the Net. The cause? Last I heard it was imagined that a trawler had dragged its anchor across the ocean-bottom pipeline.
I realized this week that a failure in the system would not immediately be understood by end users at their desks. Like me, they probably would spend a fair amount of time assuming their system or their connection was the culprit. One of these days, we might find that the invisible electronic ocean we are so used to swimming in has been drained. Even temporarily that would be vastly disruptive.
Once the dust settled I went back to Google out of curiousity and searched on "network failure". That didn't take me anywhere interesting except that there were entries from sites whose users were chronicling failures of the Blackberry and Apple iPhone networks around the country. The posts involved much weeping and gnashing of teeth about lost work productivity.
These small failures, though, pale compared to recent events out in the real world. Pakistan attempted to cut their citizens' access to YouTube last month because it contained anti-islamic content. In the process, the internet authorities managed to crash YouTube on a near global basis. The outage didn't last long, but it suggests the reality which is that the Web can be destabilized more easily than most of us probably imagine. Similar in scope was the incident in which a section of the major fiberoptic cable carrying bandwidth to India and much of Asia was damaged, cutting those regions off from the rest of the Net. The cause? Last I heard it was imagined that a trawler had dragged its anchor across the ocean-bottom pipeline.
I realized this week that a failure in the system would not immediately be understood by end users at their desks. Like me, they probably would spend a fair amount of time assuming their system or their connection was the culprit. One of these days, we might find that the invisible electronic ocean we are so used to swimming in has been drained. Even temporarily that would be vastly disruptive.
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