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April 2, 2018 01:30 am

Software Bug Behind Biggest Telephony Outage In US History

An anonymous reader writes: A software bug in a telecom provider's phone number blacklisting system caused the largest telephony outage in US history, according to a report released by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at the start of the month. The telco is Level 3, now part of CenturyLink, and the outage took place on October 4, 2016. According to the FCC's investigation, the outage began after a Level 3 employee entered phone numbers suspected of malicious activity in the company's network management software. The employee wanted to block incoming phone calls from these numbers and had entered each number in fields provided by the software's GUI. The problem arose when the Level 3 technician left a field empty, without entering a number. Unbeknownst to the employee, the buggy software didn't ignore the empty field, like most software does, but instead viewed the empty space as a "wildcard" character. As soon as the technician submitted his input, Level 3's network began blocking all incoming and outgoing telephone calls — over 111 million in total.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ziQT5LAPAm0/software-bug-behind-biggest-telephony-outage-in-us-history

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