"There were a variety of contributing factors which combined to bring down the Northeastern U.S. power grid last August. Now, it has been discovered a bug in General Electric's data monitoring and alarm XA/21 system helped in allowing the blackout spread from an isolated area. A joint U.S.-Canadian task force said that FirstEnergy employees failed to take steps that could have isolated failures because alarm systems were not working. It turns out that a deeply embedded bug was triggered by a series of events on August 14th, and when a backup server kicked in, it could not keep up with unprocessed data. FirstEnergy employees were not aware for an hour they were looking at outdated data, while warnings and alarms were not sounded because the systems were struggling to process old data. The flaw was found last October and a fix was in place by November 19th. News of the system bug was only released today. FirstEnergy said they have already patched their system and is in the process of replacing it with a newer Esca system from French nuclear engineers Areva SA."
Source:
Arstechnia
Feb 13, 2004, 04:05 PM
