Reply #87: It doesn't need to be a permanent failure. [View All]

Two or three weeks would make quite a dent in peoples' lives.

I worked in telecom for 20 years, doing low level control software for PBX's, routers and switches. I remember reading about a cascading crash that happened in the '70s or early 80's when a poorly coded switch statement in C -- the programmer forgot to put in the "default" statement and the flow of control fell though when a bad value was encountered. The bad value was propagated through to the next switch in the system (that was running the same software) and the failure cascaded until it hit some kind of service boundary. That took out all public telecom halfway down the eastern seaboard.

We can try and engineer our way out of such traps, but as I said before, complex adaptive systems exhibit unpredictable failure modes.