Microsoft is famous for their “Where do you want to go today?” advertising campaign, but for 30,000 passengers the answer was “Home!” or “Anywhere!” after a “maintenance failure” left aircraft pilots around Los Angeles without radio communications for three hours.
After being migrated from UNIX to Windows based servers, the radio communications system for Southern California needs to be rebooted every month. If a manual reboot is not performed, the Voice Switching and Control System (VSCS) is programmed to shutdown after 49.7 days of use to prevent data overload. A new technician failed to perform the reboot, leading the system to automatically switch off and leaving air traffic controllers unable to contact 800 planes for approximately three hours.
More at the New York Times (sorry, no registration free link for this article).
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 at 6:34 and is filed under Technology, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.