The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

All the while the bug was there. Not a bit of malware, not a virus, not a worm. Just a glitch, more of a programming error than anything else. In effect what this bug, called XA/21, did was cause a machine to respond with a busy signal when multiple systems tried to access it simultaneously rather than prioritizing these requests and then taking each of the “calls” in turn. As more and more data points were rebuffed, they started to stack up rather than being logged and then deleted. Like silt in a water purification system or cholesterol in your artery, all these tiny bits of retained information started to stanch the free flow of all information, slowing everything down, way down, and eventually crashing the main server. All the accumulated unprocessed events were then transferred to the backup server, which was no better equipped than its predecessor to handle this vast backlog and so it, too, failed.