The fact that several systems had problems today shouldn’t come as a big surprise, what should surprise us is any given day that more systems don’t go down, that we don’t see more problems on any given day. There are milions of computer systems out there running billions and billions of lines of code, and they depend these days on a complex series of networks interconnected via the public net that in turn is a staggering number of systems, routers, fiber optic cables and so forth.
I heard with United that it was network malfunctions, probably router failures. These are supposed to be redundant, but things can happen and you end up where the network running the systems goes into a packet storm or other problems.
As far as the NYSE goes, it may not be as easy as failing over. Failovers to DR sites usually happen when you have loss of a data center or for example, if you have a natural disaster, and few trading systems have hot failover capability like that, it is just too costly to maintain that with a full blown trading environment. More importantly, if this is what I suspect, if this was a new software release on their trading systems that went south, failing over wouldn’t have helped, if key data got screwed up, or they need to do data conversion to roll back to the prior software, it can be time consuming as hell…and if they have trashed databases involved, it can be a mess.
The real answer is these systems are very complex, involving a lot of hardware and software, and given trading volumes today things like this can happen. No matter how well you test these systems, you can get a cascade failure that escalates out of control, and something like this is the result.
The entire computer system in the US State Department that issues to visas to foreigners went down for 3 weeks last month. Thousands of people had to cancel travel plans to the US.
I heard someone on the news attributing this to Anonymous, the hacker group.
I know a tech type that always laughs about the concept that they are some organized group that does coordinated attacks. He says they are teenage hackers, working from their bedrooms, randomly.
I love the way one of the big “news” networks keeps reminding people that the official word is that it is all coincidental, and then interviewing people who are explaining how it can be a sign of cyber attacks…
I just had a vision of some little person, humming, and running a vacuum in some little office someplace, and knocking an electric plug out of an outlet with the vacuum cleaner.
