The Eastern Seaboard power blackout that occurred in 2003 (started at 4:10 on Aug 14, 2003, with the recovery varying by region) was a milestone in many of our lives. Not only was it full of personal consequences - I can remember my wife calling me in a panic as I was driving home, but it had some severe business and societal impacts, and changed how we view service interruptions in IT. The blackout forced many businesses to seriously consider what an interruption in basic services could cost the organization, and also to consider how to do business without various services. In short, we now do Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) a lot more, and a lot more rigorously than we did pre-2003.
=============== Rob VandenBrink |
Rob VandenBrink 578 Posts ISC Handler Aug 17th 2011 |
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Aug 17th 2011 1 decade ago |
I spent 8 hours sitting in a R.A.C.E.S. radio room doing backup communications. There were 3 of us total. Thank goodness we just did rough outage assessments from our QTH. Amateur Radio is often looked at as 'old technology' but usually works when other stuff doesn't. Not sure what happens if we have a good solar flare. 73
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Anonymous |
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Aug 17th 2011 1 decade ago |
I remember it well. I was at my last job and Blaster was knocking down systems over all across the company but management said we could not patch the servers because people needed to do their work. Which Blaster was interrupting, of course.
When we went on UPS, everything went dark except for the data center so we began applying the Blaster patch and rebooting servers. ![]() It was odd how the power loss was distributed. My small suburb never had a power loss except for about fifteen minutes in the beginning. But every town on our every border was black. Everyone was coming to our town to fill up with gas. My home is in a lower part of the area so we had full water pressure for the three days. But the people just a few streets east of us, and higher, lost water pressure after one day. I guess this was one time when it was good to be downhill. ![]() |
Anonymous |
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Aug 17th 2011 1 decade ago |
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention I was in Akron, OH at the time, the home of FirstEnergy, supposedly the company that kicked it all off by not trimming the trees around their power lines.
Or maybe not: http://www.schneier.com/essay-002.html "The Blaster worm affected more than a million computers running Windows during the days after Aug. 11. The computers controlling power generation and delivery were insulated from the Internet, and they were unaffected by Blaster. But critical to the blackout were a series of alarm failures at FirstEnergy, a power company in Ohio. " Maybe this event is where the Stuxnet authors got their inspiration. |
Anonymous |
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Aug 17th 2011 1 decade ago |
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