The first sign that something had gone haywire in AT&T;'s long-distance telephone network came at 2:25 p.m. last Monday, when the giant map of the U.S. in the company's operations center in New Jersey began to light up like a football scoreboard. For reasons still being investigated, a computer in New York City had come to believe it was overloaded with calls, and it started to reject them. Alerted to New York's troubles, dozens of backup computers across the U.S. automatically switched in to take up the slack -- only to exhibit the same bizarre symptoms. People trying to place long-distance...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
