August 15, 2007

Single computer brought LAX to a halt

We heard of the problems that happened at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX over the weekend, yet we did not really know what the problem was or what caused it.

Well after all of those problems that affected over 17,000 air passengers it turns out that the problem was on a single desktop computer, in fact it was just a single faulty network interface card, which enables the computer to connect to the local area network.

The problem started on Saturday afternoon, the meant that there was a build up of data which began to overload the system and therefore caused the other network cards to begin to fail and so the problem escalated into chaos, then total failure.

Even though they managed to get the system up and running within nine hours, once restarted the system failed once more due to a power supply problem.

Its amazing how something so simple can bring an airport such as LAX to a complete halt for virtually a whole weekend.

Source [LA Times]