Outages & Slowdowns

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo Dude,
                 Today's morning paper reported an apology of the giant MCI 
tele communications company (home office in Clinton, Miss) for the past ten 
days of outages and slowdowns to its 3,000 clients or customers.  Since each 
of those could be a list of hundreds, or thousands, of individual 
subscribers, like the P-list, it is no surprise that the P-list would have 
slowdowns and outages of the sort we've been experiencing.  MCI blames Lucent 
Technologies for a software package failure.  Sounds like a juicy, precedent 
setting, litigation in the works.  
                "Jennifer Pigg, an analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston, 
said MCI WorldCom's difficulties demonstrate that no matter how much 
attention communications companies pay to securing their wires and other 
physical infrastructure, they still have a huge vulnerability--the software 
that runs the increasingly complex and busy networks.
                "It's virtually impossible to test these software loads on a 
fully scaled network prior to rollout.  You'll never catch all the glitches," 
Pigg said.  "You have to expect software outages, and software outages can be 
cataclysmic."  etc. etc.
                 But what do I know?  I'm only....
                                                                 Max