Fergie's Tech Blog

LAX Outage is Blamed on a Single Computer

Tami Abdollah writes in The Los Angeles Times:

U.S. Customs officials said Tuesday that they had traced the source of last weekend's system outage that left 17,000 international passengers stranded in airplanes to a malfunctioning network interface card on a single desktop computer in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX.

The card, which allows computers to connect to a local area network, experienced a partial failure that started about 12:50 p.m. Saturday, slowing down the system, said Jennifer Connors, a chief in the office of field operations for the Customs and Border Protection agency.

As data overloaded the system, a domino effect occurred with other computer network cards, eventually causing a total system failure a little after 2 p.m., Connors said.

"All indications are there was no hacking, no tampering, no terrorist link, nothing like that," she said. "It was an internal problem" contained to the Los Angeles International Airport system.

The system was restored about nine hours later, only to give out again late Sunday for about 80 minutes, until about 1:15 a.m. Monday. The second outage was caused by a power supply failure, Connors said. But customs officials are investigating whether the Saturday incident may have played a role in Sunday's outage.

posted by Fergie @ 8/15/2007 01:43:00 PM