[cisco-voip] NASA: Are you sure you want to delete these phones?

[Jason Aarons (US)]

http://www.voip-news.com

April 14, 2006

Several hundred NASA employees were forced to rely on personal cell
phones and PDAs Wednesday when a new VoIP system shut down at their
Washington D.C. headquarters.

The system outage, which occurred at approximately 1:30 p.m., April 12,
disabled the phone system and all computer networking for several hours.
While technicians were able to reinstate network connectivity by 3 p.m.,
VoIP phone service did not return until 7:30 p.m.

"The technicians were doing standard configurations and adding new users
when the system shut down," said Sonja Alexander, spokesperson for NASA.
"But, during the outage, key NASA employees were able to continue
working by using their cell phones."

According to an internal NASA memo circulated the following day, the
system shutdown occurred when a contracted technician inadvertently
deleted the entire NASA Headquarters VoIP user database while adding 19
new VoIP user accounts to the system. Although a safety net is built
into the system, and a warning question appeared advising against the
action, "the technician answered the question incorrectly," the memo
said.

NASA headquarters began installing the VoIP system in January, a project
that is expected to be finished sometime this month. Spokesperson
Alexander said that, in response to the shutdown, a series of safety
measures are being put into place to ensure against future malfunctions,
as well as to reduce recovery time should another one take place. 

"I know that we are creating additional procedural changes so that, if
something happened again, the system would be restored more quickly,"
she said.




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