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

[Voll, Scott]

talk about a bad day at the job.........

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From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net on behalf of Jason Aarons (US)
Sent: Tue 7/18/2006 7:10 PM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: [cisco-voip] NASA: Are you sure you want to delete these phones?



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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