January 15, 1990: The AT&T Reboot

Play
AT&T
AT&T

1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals.

The continued failure lasted for 9 hours, leaving 60,000 customers without long distance calling. The problem was resolved when engineers found a bug in the latest update dealing with 4ESS long distance switches. They applied a patch which stopped the crash-reboot cycle.

Subscribe to the Day in Tech History

Subscribe to Day In Tech History:

RSS Feed - iTunes - Android - Spotify - iHeartRadio

Facebook

RSS Bandwidth by Cachefly Get a 14 Day Trial

- Join me on Patreon and support Day in Tech History

  • Intel acquires Xircom
  • Wikipedia is launched
  • Coveritlive and Twitter goes down for Steve Jobs Keynote