4 ms·
There was an incident with similar consequences on April 10, 2014. The cause was a programmed threshold being breached and the impact was 6h of downtime. Sourc
by mekaj 8y ago
There was an incident with similar consequences on April 10, 2014. The cause was a programmed threshold being breached and the impact was 6h of downtime.
Source: "The Coming Software Apocalypse" published by The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...)
walrus01 also linked to https://www.fcc.gov/document/april-2014-multistate-911-outage-report https://www.fcc.gov/document/april-2014-multistate-911-outag... in another comment.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago> Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions. I'm really curious if there's some explanation that makes this sound less catastrophically stupid, particularly the part where they picked a threshold less than INT_MAX.
- MacroChip 8y agoGreat question. Maybe they did pick a sensible constant, but it still wasn't enough. I.e. INT_MAX wasn't big enough.
- swiftcoder 8y agoWhat do you mean, VARCHAR(8) is a perfectly valid way of storing counters...
- ineedasername 8y agomuch better to future proof it by using a BLOB. You know, just in case you ever need to shove something else in there.
- AdamJacobMuller 8y agoif you're going to use a BLOB how can you know the type and how to decode it? Make sure to serialize that data with something like protobuf.
- oneplane 8y agoNah, describe it using some custom binary format and have a 1000 page spec to document it!
- justinclift 8y agoYay, seralised bluetooth! ;)
- dharmab 8y agoAllocating pieces of a resource without accounting for reusing released resources?