AT&T Among 'Winners' For Worst Software Bugs

snipped from _Wired_ magazine:

Here, in chronological order, is the Wired News list of the 10 worst software bugs of all time ... so far.

January 15, 1990 -- AT&T Network Outage: A bug in a new release of the software that controls AT&T's #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash when they receive a specific message from one of their neighboring machines -- a message that the neighbors send out when they recover from a crash.

One day a switch in New York crashes and reboots, causing its neighboring switches to crash, then their neighbors' neighbors, and so on. Soon, 114 switches are crashing and rebooting every six seconds, leaving an estimated 60 thousand people without long distance service for nine hours. The fix: engineers load the previous software release.

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