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Verizon's NYC 911 System Shutdown
Dead Nancy writes "A combination of human error and software that didn't anticipate it brought down New York City's 911 emergency line for several hours on Friday night."
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dead nancy
I wonder what the effects were, if anyone was seriously dead due to the matter.
"Quick! Give me the number for 911!" - Homer J. Simpson
Arg, I got to call 911... /me picks up the phone and dials 911
Do do do! The number you have dialed, Nine One One has been disconnected. Please check your number and try again.
Crap!
Do you think someone called 911 to report the emergency outage?
Hey I hadn't heard about this yet. I bet alot of other people havn't either.
we KNOW what software it was running, right? ;)
And some boring NYC techie's wife is on the bottom of the river, sleeping forever.
well the calls were routed to 311, so the calls got answered, just maybe not as quickly. Yes this sucks, but the calls didn't go nowhere.
I think this is a shining demonstration of why monopolies shouldn't be allowed to run the phone system. Speaking of monopolies, I wonder what the 'software' concerned was?
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---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
You read stores like this and think, "Oh, it was just error."
But you fail to realize that a big heist probably took place. I saw George Clooney and Matt Damon do it to Las Vegas. They let off this big ass EMP and shut down the power to the whole city! Long story short, they stole a shitload of money and got away with it.
Don't let these stories fool you, that is exactly what happened here.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
And to think everyone was worrying about the terrorists, fer chrissakes.
we could, uh, do without the, uhmmmm, simpsons quotes. especially if they have very little to do with the story.
yeeeah, you'll be uh, getting that +5 funny regardless.
the real number is 912
I'd "call the wahmbulance," but 911 isn't currently available.
(Are you new here?)
Do you like German cars?
Considering Slashdot doesn't write their own articles and it is basically an aggregate of postings from other sites, I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
:P
Technically, any news on Slashdot is old news since it has been reported already.
Was it a "what does this little red button do?", or a misconfiguration somewhere by a sleep-deprived sysop at 3am?
to get emergency services?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Verizon began taking steps yesterday to better protect New York City's 911 emergency line after a data error by an employee brought down the system in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island for about two hours on Friday night, city and Verizon officials said.
The emergency system broke down about 7:20 p.m. after a Verizon engineer who was making service changes to a bank's telephone numbers in Brooklyn inadvertently included numbers that are used to carry 911 calls, city and telephone company officials said. The numbers were close in sequence, the officials said.
The 911 calls then ended up being rerouted to the bank's phone system, and callers heard a busy signal. City and Verizon officials said that while the backup system in place for 911 was functioning properly, it failed to pick up the calls because it was designed to catch a technical error, not a human error that would be interpreted as simply a change of instruction.
Daniel Diaz Zapata, a Verizon spokesman, said the telephone company would now require a second person to double-check any entry of data that could affect the 911 system, and said the company planned a thorough review of its procedures that would be documented in a report to the city within a few days.
"We determined that a human error resulted in the accidental rerouting of phone calls during a procedure to upgrade service for a corporate client," Mr. Zapata said. "We have immediately altered our processes to ensure this type of situation does not reoccur. We have assured the city that we took immediate steps to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Citing privacy concerns, Mr. Zapata declined to identify the Verizon engineer, except to say that he was a veteran of the company. Mr. Zapata said it was unlikely that disciplinary action would be taken against him.
Police and fire officials said yesterday that they had no reports of injuries during the 911 failure. Fire officials said that about 60 firefighters responded to a major fire, at 3301 Foster Avenue in Brooklyn, which was called in at 8:49 p.m. by someone using a fire alarm box on the street. There were no injuries in the fire.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information, said the department immediately adopted emergency procedures, like requiring e officers on patrol to turn on their flashing lights so people could find them easily and increasing staffing at precinct station houses to answer phone calls. But he said there was no reported increase in crime.
"This didn't present an opportunity for the criminally minded - like the blackout did - because probably most people were unaware that it was out of service," he said.
However, several City Council members expressed anger that the 911 system could have been so easily disabled, and called for creating a more effective backup procedure.
"It's an emergency wakeup call," said Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, who plans to hold a hearing about the incident. "We don't have an adequate backup system for 911, which is more important than ever as we fight the war against terrorism."
Gino P. Menchini, the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said city officials were working with Verizon to ensure that the emergency system's numbers were clearly identified, and that its software and equipment were protected from similar human errors.
But Mr. Menchini emphasized that the emergency system already had many built-in safeguards, such as the ability to route 911 calls through either of two central offices and their 911 answering centers. "The bottom line is, 911 works very well, and it's worked very well for a long time," Mr. Menchini said.
Several emergency services experts agreed yesterday with Mr. Menchini, saying that New York 911 system compared favorably with those in other large cities and that an error like the one made by Verizon could not necessaril
Jay | http://oldos.org
I think the illiterate /. crowd has stumbled upon a valid use of the double negative.
Although a better word would be "unanswered," nowhere will work
Hey, I can't find the eleven....
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
Non-reg link: here
"You got the wrong number, this is nine one...two"
-Chief Wiggum
In other news, you could hook up a 220VAC generator to any telco box and effectivly take out your entire citys area code...
;p
It'd also take out any other area code as well, as long as it was directly connected using the same switching methods.... it'd just keep on going down the line...
What would happen is everyones telephone would ring and ring and possibly be electrocuted if they weren't careful handling the phone...
Not to mention anyone who was stripping their phone wiring with their teeth like I usually do when I have to strip phone wire!
A little off topic, but interesting non the less,..
I don't have anything against making an emergency system more reliable or robust, but I just hate when everyone says that "something needs to get done to improve this" when something bad happened. In this case, if politicians knew of this ahead of time, why was something not done about it then??? My guess is that it's just a politically correct statement to make but the politicians just have no clue on how the system works.
DrkBr
I once built an HA cluster that had a role in the 911 system, at a major telco switch vendor. Apparently the fines for a vendor bungle in this are in the millions of dollars per minute of downtime. I dont know which switches these are, but such penalties could affect that vendor in fines and their bottom line. It looks like Verizon shot itself in the foot, but keep an eye out for a dip in share prices for some of the switch vendors in case the blame gets spread around.
The 911 system seems to have continued to work correctly, but the regular numbers that calls to 911 get directed to were redirected to a bank. So the issue is really that there aren't safeguards against the wrong phone numbers getting changed accidentally, and the phone lines used by the 911 system aren't immune.
Shouldn't the interface for the system prevent you from accidentally modifying similar but unrelated numbers when you're modifying a set of numbers?
It doesn't work? My bad... it certainly worked before.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Verizon began taking steps yesterday to better protect New York City's 911 emergency line after a data error by an employee brought down the system in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island for about two hours on Friday night, city and Verizon officials said.
Now imagine what a genuinely malevolent person could accomplish. Perhaps a single individual shouldn't be capable of disabling such a critical system.
Do you like German cars?
This type of error is a classic problem of the computer assuming that the human was right. We create machines to give us power, but use that power to cavalierly.
The idea of having a second person "double-check" is nice in theory, but I will wager that the second person will let errors through too. If the first person is careful, the second person is faced with a long list of matching, correct entries to check. The second person soon becomes fatigued and keeps hitting the "OK" button even when there is a discrepancy. Unless the second person is offered an outsized reward (and the first person is penalized by an even greater amount), its to easy to become apathetic or non-vigilant. (Also, the double-checking process assumes that the original set of command directives was correct).
The real solution is a meta system that logs any changes to the system (like a config change), monitors dependencies of that change, and cross-checks them during exceptions. When an exception occurs, such as a bunch of 911 busy signals, the system would trace through the code and config files and correlate the fact that the onset of busy-911 calls corresponded with the insertion of the erroneous numbers. The system would then either roll-back the changes that caused a fault or alert someone of the list of likely culprits.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I always thought it was just an annoying phrase we were having drilled into our heads, but now we now the guy really has problems with Verizon service.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Of course it did, but when they check their server logs and see 20,000 people logging in with the same username, they disable it
Dont bother posting NYT usernames unless you create it specifically for the article, and even then it may stop working once enough people use it.
why do you think I was waiting for it to ring?!
....shit just happens. There are many more things that we could be busting on Verizon about than this....
there was the trick of adding the partner tag at the end of the url to avoid reg mentioned on other slashdot story earlier..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
is that there is a very finite number of customers for things like electricity and phone service. You need a very large customer base in order to be able to charge a reasonable amount.
When you allow competition those that attempt to compete are forced to either charge less than it costs to supply the service or charge more. If they charge less but can't get the customer base they go out of business. If they charge more people tend not to switch. And if you don't charge enough less, nobody cares enough to switch.
Cox saves us all of a buck or two over Qwest on phone service. We never bothered to switch until we switched to Cox for high speed internet.
And of course the only reason Cox had the money to implement phone service is because they're the monopoly on cable service.
In cases like this it's actually better for the government to force the monopoly to act in the best interest of the people than to allow competition which just gives people the false impression that it'll lead to cheaper prices and better service.
Competition in these cases are almost always forced to either cut corners to survive or charge more.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Police and fire officials said yesterday that they had no reports of injuries during the 911 failure
Shocking - there were no reported injuries during the time when nobody was able to report injuries.
After reviewing their records, the police also realized that before the 911 system was implemented, there were no calls to 911.
"gaaaaackkkk... Get this thing off of me!!!"
"... that number is temporarily out of service."
......grrrrrrrrrrrrrr......
......grrrrrrrrrrrrrr......
"Look you F&*%#$ chihuaha!! I'm sorry I took your chalupa! I'm sorry god damnit!!!"
"Please check the number and try your call again again."
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!"
"If you need assistance please call your operator."
*gurrrgle*
*click*
311 is the non-emergency number for police/fire/medical services in some areas.
Visit the
Last I checked 511 will tell you your own phone number. It sounds silly, but it came in handy for me in college when they would often forget to tell us the phone numbers for our dorm rooms.
That number is handy, but I have to admit that the time I called the pizza place that I knew had caller id and asked them what my phone number was makes a lot better story!
NOTE: I just tried this on my home for and it worked. My phone company is CenturyTel.
That's what I had thought-- but believe it or not, the username/password combo lasted for quite a long time, so...
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Probably because folks were trying to use 911 to report them.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
You don't know Microsoft wasn't responsible.
Lives could have been lost in this technology failure, and Microsoft is a technology company right? Can't we all just agree to distort the truth so that Microsoft looks responsible?
Isn't that why we're all here? Isn't it?
The number you have dialed, Nine...One...One is not in service. No further information is available about Nine...One...One. The number you have dialed...
If you ask anyone from IT who has to deal with Verizon, they'll all tell you that Verizon and incompetence go together.
"Can you hear me now?..." After a few minutes of silence, the Verizon Guy is totally disillusioned.
In any case, New York is the suxx0rz because city services don't work.
The information is now incorrect! Don't mod me up, mod people who deserve it!
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
> A combination of human error and software that
> didn't anticipate...
Several "human errors", one of them be excessive centralization.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No, I'm New Here
this is an old trick that would have never ever ever worked and originated as a JOKE! It was orignally known as the "blotto box", google around for more info.
Here a few years ago there was a sting of robberies where the thieves called a whole lot of people and convinced them to "test" the emergency response system at a specified time a few days later.
All of a sudden there were hundreds of simultaneous calls reporting accidents, fires, muggings, heart attacks, rapes, robberies, etc. The thieves robbed two banks and a big-box store while the police were tied up.
#include <errno.h>
#include <phone/system.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stupid/verizon.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
- char *phone_number = get_phone_number();
/*
}* This will never happen, and the routine is slow.
*
* validate_phone_number(phone_number);
* if (errno == EBADPHONENUM) {
* yell_at_verizon(errno, "moron");
* return EXIT_FAILURE;
* }
*/
change_phone_number(phone_number);
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
Devin
... DIebold anounced their plans to replace Verizon at handling the 911 system...
"We figured out that with our new phone systems, completely powered by Microsoft Software these problems will be a thing of the past"
how long until
The political types saying that they don't have a good enough backup 911 system failed to understand the root cause of this failure.
A Verizon tech who was re-routing a customer's numbers accidently made a numerical error that ended up re-routing lines that were meant to go to 911 to a bank. Therefore, the backup system never got a chance to kick in, people were being routed to a very poor selection for a primary destination.
The safety valve that I'm sure is being installed now is requiring a higher degree of password to change the routing instructions for the 911 lines... because this tech should not have been able to mess with them, and didn't mean to, he just typoed the numbers he was supposed to type in. He at least should have seen a "You're trying to reroute 911! Are you sure you want to do that? N" prompt.
As I read the article, it is obvious that NYC's system is fraught with deep flaws in its design and management. These include:
1. False redundancy: Although the NYC system has a backup central offices and call centers, it apparently routes all calls from the affected area through a single Verizon subsystem. Their system is fully redundant except where its not.
2. Organizational silos in a coupled system: The City claimed that its 911 system was fine because "an error like the one made by Verizon could not necessarily have been prevented because it was not a flaw in the 911 system itself." Yet the Verizon circuits, systems, and procedures are an integral part of the 911 system. The City (and Verizon) maintain a fiction that they are independent entities when, in fact, they are tightly coupled. This division of responsibility is fine for playing the CYA Blame Game, but does not create a robust system.
3. User Interface Flaws I don't know what kind of user interface that technician was using, but it obviously has some terrible flaws if it did not warn him of the implications of the data entries. I also suspect that he was manually retyping some numbers off a computer print-out when he should have had some mechanism to download a set of proofread, verified, double-checked entries.
I don't fault NYC or Verizon in particular, they are probably no worse that anyone else. I only get angry that these types of structural insecurities are probably more widespread than anyone realizes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You want a real 911 call, try this recording. It is an oldie but a goodie.
why couldn't have bush chocked on a pretzel in that time!
(For those that don't get the subject it was a Public Enemy song, which was later covered by Duran Duran.)
Eh? Did NYPD and NYFD need the 911 system to find out about the WTC strikes? Terrorism isn't about killing people, it's about getting publicity.
The councilman can rest assured that the terrorists will helpfully keep their activities high-profile enough that 911 notification will not be required.
[Sheesh, why does *everything* have to be about terrorism these days.]
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Blame you guys.
No, it's not "almost is bad", it's many times worse. Not being able to switch your phone number is an inconvenience. Not being able to get help when you're being robbed, your house is burning, or your spouse just had a heart attack is catastrophic.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The NYT has a habit of catching these things. It won't even let you register cypherpunks/cypherpunks. However, there is a work around -- get some sort of proxy, such as Proxomitron, and configure it so the referer is news.google.com. The same trick works with the WaPo's new registration service.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I was thinking more of a system that would catch this sort of error in advance, rather than after the damage had already been done by a data-entry error.
Absolutely! A competent network simulation would help predict the impact of a change and catch errors before they are committed. A monitoring system that correlated changes in system behavior against changes in configuration provides added safety in the likely event that the simulation is imperfect or the technician enters values different from that simulated.
Its a tricky problem because at some micolevel, the technician's entries were valid because the box he was configuring would have no way of knowing that it should not route calls to the bank (the bank and 911 system are just 2 indistingushable high-volume trunk lines). Only at the application layer would the system notice that 911 calls weren't getting answered.
I do agree that simulation of the ffects of command/config and inline warnings of the impact of a change woudl be good.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Wow, way to crash and burn. That was really unfunny.
So reliable 911 service *isn't* an advantage that POTS has over VOIP?
-Rich
Please, this is karma whoring (perhaps unintentially), don't mod a non-reg link comment Informative.
Instead mod non-reg links and article texts as FUNNY if they are not posted AC, this brings them to the top and adds nothing to the posters karma score.
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
Not likely. I bet it was a secret attack by the LOD!
Big corporate clients are the worst kind of assholes as customers.
Of course the executives themselves never suffer... Fuckers.
...just found a new job. Well, he's unemployed again anyways.
I second this. I Live in PA. I would have no idea about a NY phone system crashing if it wasn't for this website posting the info...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Thanks to the government mandated breakup and unfair reprisals against AT&T, the current phone system in the USA is **NOT** a monopoly.
This is yet another example of why the breakup was a bad thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
.... for the average consumer these days? 911 service, or ring tones in 3-D Dolby sensurround and plastic phone skins that match your ride's upholstery? Reliability, or the race to create the smallest possible phone keyboard that even elves couldn't use?
We get what we pay for.....
Besides that, seems to me just plain living in NYC 24/7 would be an automatic 911 call anyplace else...
zogger
Yet at the same time, daytime Long Distance cost over a dollar a minute from NY to California. Phones and telephone equipment had to be rented from the phone company, so technological development in many areas (faxes, answering systems, business telephony) came at a snail's pace. Also, if you think DSL rollout was slow and overpriced under the Baby Bells, just imagine what it would have been like under Ma Bell. All things have their price, and this was a high one.
Furthermore, AT&T had their problems as well. On at least one occasion, they had massive network failures due to a combination of-- guess what-- human error and software failure.
Hell, I live in NY state, and this is the first i've heard of it, online or the radio.
Having worked in private line provisioning and maintenance at Ma Bell I can say without equivocation that this is a direct result of the breakup and not really 'human error'.
I've seen the exact same thing being done at all the locals and the long distance companies.
Manpower is being drawn down, redundancies eliminated, and a talent and brain drain that causes errors like this.
The reason is always given that automation is allowing the company to maximize the remaining workforce and competition makes is neccesary. BS.
Best Practices are -gone- everything is driven by sales and bean counters. Engineers, Technicians and Managers who complain are moved, removed or eliminated from the loop because facts are not going to be allowed to get in the way.
It used to take weeks to get a misdirected line corrected in some instances.
The fault was blamed on too many layers, and union incompetence.
Now with all the improvements brought about by divestiture and competition it is a near imposibility unless it affects a major source of income or government.
This type of error was prevented by human redundancy and a workforce able to put the breaks on before the damage was done because they could stand on the strength of regulations and the union and tell the idiot boss in charge that things were wrong.
Get used to it, rapid reorder will be the order of the day.
Public Enemy got it right with their single 911 is a joke, especially the line "I call a cab cuz a cab will come quicker".
I worked 911 for 14 years........here in the midwest, we have tornados around this time of year. The warning sirens usually go off to warn the public. Ok, I'm sitting at my console, waiting for people to call about wind damage etc......and the line rings....911, do you have an emergency?....yeah, can you tell me what the sirens are going off for?.........it's a shame that the line is recorded....there have been times, when we get idiot calls like that, that you really really want to say....well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but the russians have changed their minds, the bombs will be here in 10 minutes. And then, hang up on them LOL.... Heck, we've had calls from people that ask us where Bass Pro Shops is.....(Springfield Missouri)
As far as the software is concerned, I'm glad it's getting fixed. Sounds like your typical permissions problem to me. Some guy out in the field shouldn't be able to redirect the phone number for 911. Just like some e-mail attachment I run shouldn't be able to modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run.
Seriously, this is something that should be top priority in all kinds of software. Even if the person at the keyboard should be able to modify stuff, doesn't mean they want to. And by default, they should not have the ability to modify certain data.
Let's learn from this and crack down on insecure code. PLEASE!!
Why is violating the NY Times' copyright considered "Informative"? Regardless of how the tin-foil hat crowd feels about the Times' registration policy (feed them a fake name, fer chrissake!) or how the whole /. herd feels about the current state of US copyright law, the Times actually pays people a salary to write, edit and publish this stuff, and they (IMO) have a right to say how it can be re-published. Posting the full text of their work on an unrelated site is not "fair use".
It may have been someone who recently moved to the area and didn't know about the tornado warning system. I'm old enough that when I hear a test of civil defense sirens, the first thing that comes to mind is "Oh shit. We're going to be nuked by the Russians."
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
However, several City Council members expressed anger that the 911 system could have been so easily disabled, and called for creating a more effective backup procedure.
What, like leaning out the window and screaming for help?
Or, depending on your neighborhood, leaning out the window and firing a quick 3 or 4 shots into the air?
When living in a back-lot guest house Venice, CA I was woken up in the early AM to someone pounding on the main house back door....it was the next door neighbor asking "What's the number for 911, my mom is having a heart attack!"
If only the Darwin Awards had been around back then.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
Plan 9 was an utter failure. Just three zombies? What were the aliens thinking?
The ______ Agenda
I have to say that as a former New Yawka, I unfortunately remember the more humoristic qualities of the New York ways of life. Once you take a guy "Dat tawks like dis" and make him a councilman, then you have a tough guy who needs to bully everyone around.
Let's face it. In the technology world, any single one of us could have made the same mistake. In fact, many of us have done things even more stupid than accidentally performing a typo which rerouted some information. I did it once to the US Central Automatec Clearing House for money transfers, took 3 weeks of A LOT of people working overtime to manually verify and correct my error which was actually caught 20 minutes after the system went live.
This was some guy who accidentally typed a few numbers wrong. Now you have some idiot councilman (which sounds like he was the father of a friend of mine, coincidence probably) yelling that he wants a hearing and probably will try and impose the death penelty for the offense.
After living outside of NY for 10 years, every day of my life I wish at sometime that I could have a real slice of pizza, or go shopping on 5th, or eat a hebrew national hotdog on wallstreet during lunch, it's the irrationality of the politicians who can make George Jr.'s budget deficits look tiny in relation that keep me from going back.
Oh... There's one other thing. I don't want my two kids growing up in a city with that many cops... it's practically a police state there. I would rather them feel safe because there are no cops instead of being scared to death that if they sneeze while walking at night, a cop will harrass them for an hour.
If you think you can provide the story much faster and sumit it to slashdot earlier than other people. Please do so, or stop complaining.
Anyone know which of the two (TCS / Intrado) E-911 MPC service providers cover NYC for Verizon?
So basically in every company, lives that gremlin known as greed, just waiting for the brakes (deregulation) to be taken off, and it can run rampent. In the interm it made excuses, and overall foot dragging, in lui of it getting what it really wants. Yes I can see human layers (job security) being a great dampener on basic instincts.
Yeah, and the thing was that because Bell Lab's transistor contained gold it was not comercializable. Intel invented the Al/Si transistor AND the integrated circut. Plus, by all accounts, William Shockley was... not very nice.
You're missing one vital point- according to the article, the technician was working on a bank's lines. The problem was he typed in the wrong line numbers and essentially accidentally wound up working on 911 lines instead.
The Verizon policy change will "require a second technician when the changes involve the 911 system". That policy does NOTHING to address the problem, because the tech wasn't supposed to be working on the 911 system in the first place, so he wouldn't have asked a second guy to check over his work!
A proper solution, as many have pointed out, would have been restricting changes to any component of the system involving 911- or even just a "line part of 911, change?(y/N)" would have done the trick.
Please help metamoderate.
The Cole bombing, African Embassy, WTC, Madrid, Tokyo Subway, Oklahoma City... what do all these acts of terrorism have in common? They didn't exactly require a good samaritan to report them over an emergency phone number, they were all sort of... high profile.
911 has nothing to do with terrorism, and won't protect us from terrorism. But talking about terrorism sounds very serious and makes a politician sound less clueless.
So should "Verizon, We Never Stop Working For You" now be changed to "Verizon, We Never Stop Working For You Except When You Need Us The Most"? ;)
*Dials 911*
...
Automated voice: "911 service is temporarily down. Redirecting to 311."
*Is redirected*
"Hello?"
"Yeah, uh, there's a fire over at--"
"I'm sorry, sir, you must be looking for the 911 line. Please stand by as you're redirected."
*Is redirected*
Automated voice: "911 service is temporarily down. Redirecting to 311."
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I tried dialing 511 on my Verizon cellphone, area code 314...and it put me through to the 911 switchboard. I sheepishly apologized quickly and got off the phone.
Maybe moving the 911 call center offshore to india will help?
It's annoyingly difficult to get to a public safety answering point from a cell phone. In California, 911 from Sprint cell phones usually results in waiting on hold, then reaching the California Highway Patrol. Calling information and asking for dispatch for the appropriate police department routes you to a telco supervisor, and you have to explain what you want to get there.
Go to Google News, type in "Verizon New York 911." Read all the Ny Times articles without logging on.
===--===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
"Police and fire officials said yesterday that they had no reports of injuries during the 911 failure".
Duhhh...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Orleans/Essex Counties Vermont BY SETH POWERS And ROBIN SMITH, Staff Writers - A dump truck hit an aerial fiber-optic cable in Barton Tuesday morning, knocking out most local and all long-distance phone service for 18,000 people in Essex and Orleans counties. The dump truck was working on a new driveway off Route 5 near Crystal Lake and clipped the line at 8:30 a.m., said Beth Fastiggi, spokeswoman for Verizon. After the damage, residents were able to dial within their own exchange, but not to neighboring exchanges or long distance. "People in Island Pond could call people in Island Pond, but not out of their area," Fastiggi said. Those calling into Essex and Orleans counties found the phones gave a busy signal for hours, as workers attempted to fix the problem. Phone service was restored by 1:40 p.m., after phone crews spliced a new cable into the damaged line, Fastiggi said. The damaged line is a connector between seven northern Vermont towns and St. Johnsbury - and then to the rest of the world, Fastiggi said. For an Island Pond resident to dial out of Island Pond, the resident's call goes through the St. Johnsbury host station, and out to Barton or Boston, depending on where the individual wants to call. Other affected exchanges were in Albany, Barton, Derby and Derby Line, Morgan, Newport City, Norton, Orleans and Troy, according to Evelyn Bailey, executive director of the Vermont emergency 911 board. The 911 service worked. However, people in these exchange areas, with the exception of Derby, were unable to reach it, she said Tuesday afternoon. Derby callers were connected directly to the local state police barracks and its 911 dispatchers. They would never have known that they were not tied into the 911 network, she said. The damage affected some Internet and cellular phone service as well. Both rely on land lines, depending on the service, Bailey said. Bailey, as Vermont's emergency 911 contact, and the hospital were contacted by Verizon when the network went down. Vermont State Police and other emergency services are also alerted. North Country Hospital in Newport City had working e-mail and Internet service all morning, but was limited like everyone else to calls within the city exchange, said Larry Labor, acting chief executive officer. The hospital internally had no problems after the phone system failure, he said. Emergency connections with rescue and other crews are radio-based. Also, there were plenty of cell phones on hand to connect to other health services outside the area. These kinds of failures are not rare, Bailey said. "It's so common for someone to put a backhoe into the ground without calling Dig Safe." Anyone preparing to dig is required by law to call the Dig Safe number: 888-344-7233. With Tuesday's phone system failure in mind, Bailey has two recommendations for local residents: Along with 911, have the seven-digit number for your local police or fire department handy. And don't call 911 when there are problems just to see if it is working. "You'd be surprised how many people can't resist," Bailey said.
Bob is at home in the Northeast Kingdom.
This is how I get NYT articles on the odd occasion I want to read them (not often enough to register a username/password.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I mean... how the hell do they know if you tell the truth or not?
So just go ahead and register.
I do not moderate.
How often do people use the phone during a severe storm to report dammage etc. How often does a high tension line (7200 volt an up) come down and cross a phone line or cable TV line? Ever seen a report of a wire down taking out an entire area code? Lines do come down all the time due to Ice and Wind storms. I've never heard of this taking out an area code. I have had to do repair work in a home office after a power line crossed a phone line. Anything connected between the phone line and the power line was toast due to arcing. This included a computer with modem, answering machine, cordless telephone base, and fax machine. The POTS was undamaged. The other phones in the neighborhood were OK. Only the line to the house died even though there was enough fault current to burn the line in two and drop it into the street.
The truth shall set you free!
City and Verizon officials said that while the backup system in place for 911 was functioning properly, it failed to pick up the calls because it was designed to catch a technical error, not a human error that would be interpreted as simply a change of instruction.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Apparently none of the moderators around here have ever seen "The Italian Job."
Morons.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
311? What the fuck does 311 do in America? Here in Canada (or at least, Alberta), 311 tells you what number you are dialing from. Phone company technicians use it for figuring out which line they tapped into when they're working on houses that have more than one phone line. The only reason I even know about 311 is because the tech guy told me about it when he was installing DSL at my place (he had to rewire some shit because the DSL was screwing up the alarm system).
So yeah, "It's an emergency! Call 311!" "you're calling from 555-1212" "*phew*, that's a relief"
Sprint maintains 911 records for major municipalities across the country. The 911 system is updated by various Sprint and non-Sprint companies by posting data to a server publicly available on the internet.
... very few people would care about the 911 problem. They probably wouldn't even bother to fix it.
That server is an unprotected Windows box. Connecting to the server gives you commandline access to most of the windows system commands. Without even so much as a password, one can submit "updates", alter other users' data, or just issue system commands.
I have to believe that the 911 systems under Sprint's control have been owned for a long time by anyone who wants to own them. I believe that the only reason they haven't been exploited in a very public way is because doing so wouldn't be as spectacular as many people might think.
ATT cable trashed thousands of 911 records for the Salt Lake City area a few years back, It took weeks to rebuild them. Nobody cared.
A terrorist could strategically scramble the 911 records for the LA airport before shooting up the El Al ticket counter, and
If 911 consoles around the country came up with only phone numbers and no addresses from Seattle to Miami it would take half a day for people to realize the system had been corrupted city-wide. Phone calls to Sprint wouldn't even be answered for another half a day, and they wouldn't realize that it was a national problem for another day after that. They wouldn't have a solution for three or four days into the "crisis". It would take a week for them to act on the solution.
In all, millions of subscribers around the country would be "out of the system" for as much as 10 days. None of them would ever know there had been a problem. Unless someone on the inside decided to go public and push really hard to make the news, it wouldn't be a story. And unless some senator thought it could serve some political purpose, it would all be forgotten in a week.
I believe the only digits you need for that are 9, 1, waaah.
People seem to think that the 911 system is directly connected to the systems that run the telephone network. This really isn't so.
Databases at telcos contain what they think is accurate data about how the telephone switches are configured. Telcos may occassionaly audit these two systems to see how well they match up. Then again, they may not do such audits. In modern soft switches, the DB controls the switch, so they do match exactly. But most of the world (including the U.S.) still use legacy telephone switches that are not well integrated with the customer DBs.
Every so often the telcos query their DBs to create 911 update reports. Those reports are passed on to whoever maintains the 911 systems. Then the 911 systems are updated. Maybe.
Overtime, inconsistencies between the telco's system and the 911 system build up. Every so often (once a year or so, maybe) the 911 system gets purged and reloaded from the telco's system. Between reloads, it is not uncommon for a police department to call the 911 system maintainer or the phone company or both (often the 911 maintainer and the telco are completely unrelated entities) to let them know that there were 911 calls last night from such and such phone numbers which had missing or erroneous address info. Steps may or may not be taken to manually correct the info for those individual phone numbers.
You might be surprised to see the percentage of 911 calls that come in with bogus subscriber data.
911 has been a mess for many years and it hasn't been a secret. Eventually, some homeland security committee is going to pass a lot of legislation to address this. The legislation will cost a lot of money, and impose silly requirements. It will likely be drafted by the clowns who have created the bureaucratic 911 system of today. That will only make things worse.
A handful of good IT folks could clean things up very quickly. But that will never happen.
Same problem?
This reminds me of a story I read back last month, where a programming error meant that 911 calls actually got routed to some guy's home. Fortunately he used to work as a police dispatcher, so he set about relaying the emergency calls by cellphone to the police.
Yes, I know this is /. and that the first person to post an offtopic remark, will spawn at least a 100 others, drowning the actual issue.
Yes, I know this, because it happens every single time.
But can we for the good of whatever good for once just focus on the real issue at hand here:
How can we blame this on sitefinder?!?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
That the new competitor has to run at a loss for a while is evidence that competition works, not evidence to the contrary. Why do you think Qwest's service only costs a few dollars more than Cox's service?
Whether or not Cox can compete successfully isn't the point. The fact that Cox can enter the business at all forces Qwest to charge rates that are just barely profitable to prevent new competitors from stealing their customers. If new competitors were just prohibited from entering the market in the first place, Qwest could charge prices that were very handsomely profitable, because they wouldn't have to worry about someone undercutting them by a significant margin.
paintball
another good point for outsourcing
See ya, I'm going to india
Seriously, parent was referring to fire drills *in schools*. I don't think it hurts to be clear in these things - it's entirely possible that a young child would find 9-1-1 clearer than 9-11. We're not born with these skills, you know.
...and in any case, it's now obsolete.
/. On the other hand, they might very well add slashdot.org to the approved referer list if asked, which would get rid of the whole problem.
There used to be a code in NY Times URLs that allowed entry without registration. Google News included this code for NY Times links. This code was specific to each story, probably some sort of hash. The whole 'you can add partner=SLASHDOT' thing was a joke - the point being that the reg-free entry mechanism didn't look at the partner parameter at all, but only considered the code. The upside was that once you had this URL you could paste it anywhere and it would work.
Now it appears that they are just checking the HTTP referer (sic) header against an approved list - which means no more 'reg-free' links for
We have a cute little bunny, though.
Anyhow, I dialed 9-1-1, or something like that. I was kind of panicky. So, anyway, 4-1-1 (which is what I dialed) put me through to 9-1-1.
Maybe I can get my Mensa membership converted to Densa. Whadayathink?
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
For a while, 911 was the only number you could even *find* for some police/sherriff departments. That could be a chicken and egg situation, but nevertheless, it existed.
They haven't done a very good job around central Texas of telling folks about 311, either. Most people seem to find out by accident...