Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Blackout Cause: Buggy Code

Posted by michael on from the civilization-meets-the-woodpecker dept.

blanca writes "The big northeast blackout from last summer was caused in part by a software bug in an energy managment system sold by General Electic, according to a story on SecurityFocus. The bug meant that a computerized alarm that should have been triggered never went off, hindering FirstEnergy's response to the train of events that lead to the cascading blackout. Investigators found the bug in a intensive code audit following the outage, and a patch is now available."

2 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. That sounds like a good excuse, but... by cyberb0b · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Did anyone check snopes.com for this one?

  2. OT stupid doctor story by Don'tTreadOnMe · · Score: 0, Offtopic


    Well, the story is stupid, not the doctor.

    At Virginia Tech, I started off in the honors program. The Dean of the Honors program was named, you guessed it, "Nurse". So he was Dr. Nurse.

    Not so funny, you say? Well wait, there's more !

    Dr. Nurse's wife worked in the infirmary, and she was a nurse !

    So we would wander by his office, and say, "Hello Dr. Nurse, how is the wife? Nurse Nurse?"

    I guess it wasn't really that funny.