Great to have you posting again.
MCI WorldCom still under the gun
zdnet.com
MCI Worldcom Inc. is still struggling with a debilitating weeklong outage on its frame relay data network, an error compounded in some customers' eyes by the company's lack of communication during the disruption.
As of Friday, MCI WorldCom engineers were still investigating the cause of the outage, so a precise explanation for the event "is not available yet from a technical perspective," said an MCI WorldCom spokeswoman. The Jackson, Miss., company was working to fully restore service to the few customers still disrupted.
About 30 percent of MCI WorldCom's frame relay customers from Chicago to the West Coast were affected. The outage disrupted business networks, nixed transactions at automatic teller machines and took the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) offline for several days. Outages were also reported in Boston, New York and Albany, N.Y.
The problem began as the result of a scheduled upgrade of software from Lucent Technologies Inc., the vendor of both the hardware and software MCI WorldCom uses in its frame relay network. MCI WorldCom engineers are still working with Lucent to identify whether the outage was software- or hardware-related.
Lucent 'part of' outage
As for the role of Lucent software in the outage, "It was part of it," said a Lucent spokeswoman in Murray Hill, N.J., adding that it has yet to be determined whether a fundamental flaw in the software caused the outage.
MCI WorldCom officials said the company sent all its frame relay customers letters notifying them that a scheduled software upgrade was about to occur. Once the outage struck, the company followed up with a series of letters to those customers that were affected.
But some customers have reported that once the network foundered, they received few answers from the carrier.
Chicago is fuming
At the Chicago Board of Trade, where MCI's problems have disrupted transactions since Aug. 5, board officials were fuming -- and looking for financial compensation from MCI.
In a letter to board members, board President Thomas Donovan wrote, "This latest problem with MCI WorldCom comes despite numerous past assurances."
According to Donovan, MCI's own top operations executive in charge of running the network called the outages a total "meltdown of the network."
As they seek redress from MCI, CBOT officials also are developing contingency plans for future outages.
For corporate users, the outage again demonstrated the peril of relying on a single data network. In many instances, companies have standby ISDN or dial-up data lines in preparation for the loss of major data circuits.
In the wake of a catastrophic outage of AT&T's frame relay network nearly two years ago, many corporations implemented network emergency plans, often including either ISDN backup or even redundant carriers for critical applications. |
