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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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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?
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.
My wife,daughter and I happened to be wandering around Brooklyn during the outage. We noticed an increase in the number of uniformed officers on the street. This made us slightly nervous in a 9/11 (not a 911) sort of way. It wasn't until we read Saturday's NYT that we realized what was up. To increase visibility during the outage, NYPD had ordered all plainclothes officers to put on uniforms.
As we strolled through some of the city's busiest commercial sectors, everybody as oblivious as we were.
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.
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)