I guess we better not count on them to put another man on the moon

[sully304]

Technology
Networking/Telecoms
New VoIP system brings down NASA network
by Tash Shifrin
Wednesday 19 April 2006
A new voice over IP telephone system at US space agency NASA crashed last week, bringing down IT network and phone connections for several hours.

The outage took place as the new VoIP system, supplied by Cisco, was being configured on Wednesday (12 April). Workstations and VoIP connections went down at 1.30pm.

The workstations were up and running by 3pm, but phone communications were not restored until 7.30pm, forcing headquarters staff to use mobile phones or PDAs.

The crash occurred just a week after “town hall” style meetings to introduce staff to the new system. Installation of the new system began in January.

A NASA spokesperson confirmed that communications with current space missions were not affected.



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[jneiberger]

What's interesting about this is that this short blurb by Tash Shifrin is the only reference I've been able to find on the Internet about this incident. It would be interesting to find out more about what actually happened.

 

[jneiberger]

The other interesting thing to note is that whatever caused the outage interrupted non-voice traffic because workstations were apparently down. I'd be interested to hear what sort of problem specifically related to Cisco IP telephony could take down all their workstations.

 

[jneiberger]

I checked with a Cisco engineer about this and he forwarded me this link:

http://www.voip-news.com/news/nasa-voip-disaster-041406/

It turns out that this problem was due to user error. A contractor accidentally deleted their entire user database. I have no idea why this would affect the workstations, though. There's probably more to the story.

John