Maverick post on CSCO thread about AT&T outage
[Check out the bottom comment about AT&T ASND switch purchase]
To: mrclinton (13393 )
From: Maverick
Wednesday, Apr 15 1998 1:20PM ET
Reply # of 13414
Chambers apologized AT&T for FR NW outage
AT&T blames switching equipment for outage
Mercury News Staff and Wire Reports
AT&T Corp. on Tuesday blamed problems with two pieces of switching equipment
-- made by San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc. -- for the computer network
problem that crippled automated teller machines and credit card systems nationwide
for almost a day.
Yet even after service was restored Tuesday afternoon, officials at both companies
said they weren't sure what the root cause of the outage was.
AT&T is the nation's largest supplier of data network services to companies. The
collapse of the company's ''frame-relay'' network affected only a portion of its
customers -- and had no impact on conventional or cellular phone service. Still, it
was the worst such failure ever, industry experts agreed.
''This sort of thing is going to happen infrequently, but more and more in the
future,'' said Howard Anderson, managing director of the Yankee Group, a
technology research firm. ''And it makes you realize how vital to the lifeblood of the
economy these complex computer networks have become.''
Anderson had firsthand experience with the problem. He said he had just emerged
from a Tower Records store in San Jose where there had been a long line of
frustrated customers whose credit card transactions could not be processed. ''I had
cash, so it was great for me,'' Anderson said. ''I went straight to the front of the
line.''
Throughout California, probably a thousand of AT&T's business customers were
affected, a company spokeswoman estimated. Among them was Wells Fargo,
which connected about half of its branches and automatic teller machines to the
company's central computers in Sacramento through AT&T's frame-relay network.
The branches stayed open after the outage but the bank machines shut down,
prompting Wells Fargo to scramble for another way to connect the automatic tellers
to the company's computers, said spokesman Mark Marymee. Working with MCI
Communications Corp. and 3Com Corp. and the Roseville Telephone Company, a
local phone company near Sacramento, Wells Fargo had almost all of its
connections re-established by the time branches opened Tuesday, Marymee said.
To: Gary (13398 )
From: Maverick
Wednesday, Apr 15 1998 1:22PM ET
Reply # of 13414
Chambers apologized AT&T, part II
Elsewhere, the impact of the network breakdown was uneven. Some businesses
and institutions noticed slowdowns. These included Northwest Airlines, in its
processing of reservations, and the American Red Cross, in the tracking of its blood
supply.
Many businesses suffered financial losses as a result, though only a few offered
estimated Tuesday. Tele-Communications Inc., the cable television giant, pegged
its losses at as much as $5 million -- resulting from the inability of TCI
representatives who field requests for pay-per-view services, installation and
repairs at 500 offices to log in to the company's central data base to get access to
billing information or to process orders.
The breakdown was something of a black eye for Cisco, which has been trying to
sign up more phone companies as customers, breaking into the markets of Lucent
Technologies Inc. and Northern Telecom Ltd.
''We view this interruption as unacceptable, and apologize to our joint customers
who have been affected,'' John Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco, said in a
press release Tuesday. ''The Cisco team, together with AT&T, will continue to
focus on this matter until we are convinced that all problems associated with this
outage have been identified and resolved.''
In the aftermath of the outage, Cisco rushed two new pieces of its equipment to
AT&T's switching offices in Albany, N.Y., and Cambridge, Mass., via a chartered
jet, said Darryl Miller of FOB America, the company that delivered the equipment.
The AT&T network that went down is called a frame relay network because of the
the method it uses to handle data at high speeds. The data packets are sent almost
instantaneously over fiber optic telecommunications lines and complex switches
across the country.
AT&T's frame relay network has 145 switching hubs, or nodes. Company
executives said on Tuesday that the exact cause of the breakdown had not yet been
determined. But one executive said that the problem began with a data
transmission between the Albany and Cambridge hubs. The problem cascaded
uncontrollably to the other hubs in the network, for some as-yet undetermined
reason.
To: G. Richmond (13399 )
From: Maverick
Wednesday, Apr 15 1998 1:25PM ET
Reply # of 13413
Chambers apologized AT&T, part III
Frank Ianna, AT&T's vice president for network and computer services, said it
would probably take two or three days to pinpoint the precise cause of the
breakdown. He said the cause was most likely ''some combination of hardware and
software'' failure.
[Frank Ianna approved the purchase of several hundred ASND's BSTDX-9000 FR switches and CBX 500 ATM edge switches in early 98 for a NW build out parallel to the existing one using Stratacom IPX 16 FR switches.]
Mercury News Staff Writer Jon Healey and The New York Times contributed to this
report. |
