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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: matt dillabough who wrote (9192)	8/17/1999 12:16:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

Lucent accepts blame for flawed software and MCI outage - Ebbers Monday August 16 07:38 PM EDT MCI WorldCom blames Lucent software for outage John Rendleman, ZDNet MCI WorldCom Inc.'s 10-day frame relay outage was technically due to a new software upgrade from Lucent Technologies Inc. that the carrier began using four weeks ago, MCI WorldCom officials said today. The intermittent outage, which began Friday, Aug. 5, was finally resolved yesterday, but only after MCI WorldCom shut down the affected portion of its frame relay network Saturday for nearly 24 hours of troubleshooting. Customers left without service during the disruption will receive two days' service credit for every day they were without data links, a credit that in most instances will equal 20 days' worth of free service, said MCI WorldCom President and CEO Bernard Ebbers during a press conference today. During the outage, "we did not always meet our customers' expectations," Ebbers said. Nor did MCI WorldCom fully explain the nature of the outage and its own efforts to resolve the problem. "The fact is that we did not always have those answers, and we still are investigating some of those software issues" that resulted in the network crash, Ebbers said. So far, the company has determined that the outage began as the result of flawed Lucent software being loaded onto hardware on one of MCI WorldCom's four distinct frame relay networks. The one specific network affected is one that MCI WorldCom, of Jackson, Miss., uses to service customers with requirements for international data circuits. That specific network serves 3,000 customers, including America Online Inc. and the Chicago Board of Trade, and consists of 300 different switches and switching nodes. Before the outage, the network had been certified by engineers at Lucent, of Murray Hill, N.J., as meeting all necessary operating parameters for a network of its scope, said MCI WorldCom officials. "Lucent has acknowledged full responsibility and confirmed that it was a software upload problem," Ebbers said, related to a network upgrade intended to allow the network to expand during the next several years to meet growing customer traffic demand. "We have gone back to a software load that we had run successfully for a continued period of time, and we have no plans to risk our network again," at least until the underlying cause of the software error is rooted out and fixed, Ebbers said. dailynews.yahoo.com