Cisco's Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight (bloomberg.com)

Reader Dharkfiber writes: Bloomberg is covering a story today about a hosting business that is now filing chapter 11 due to bugs in a switch. Good, bad, or ugly, is it time to admit that business really can't continue without IT? When will IT training become formal curriculum in schools?An excerpt from the Bloomberg report: There's buggy code in virtually every electronic system. But few companies ever talk about the cost of dealing with bugs, for fear of being associated with error-prone products. The trial, along with Peak Web's bankruptcy filings, promises a rare look at just how much or how little control a company may have over its own operations, depending on the software that undergirds it. Think of the corporate computers around the world rendered useless by a faulty update from McAfee in 2010, or of investment company Knight Capital, which lost $458 million in 30 minutes in 2012 -- and had to be sold months later -- after new software made erratic, automated stock market trades. Peak Web, founded in 2001, had worked with companies including MySpace, JDate, EHarmony, and Uber. Under its $4 million-a-month contract with Machine Zone, which began on April 1, 2015, it had to keep Game of War running with fewer than 27 minutes of outages a year, court filings show. According to Machine Zone, the hosting service couldn't make it a month without an outage lasting almost an hour. Another in August of that year was traced to faulty cables and cooling fans, according to the publisher.

Comments

Re:All Cisco users had this problem?

[ewhac]

And we constantly had to explain the man-hour and spares costs to the suits . .

Suit: "Explain the man-hour and spares costs to me."

Engineer: "Certainly." (*brains him with a fried 24-port managed switch*) "Would you like it explained again?"