There will be a colloquium on Thursday, October 29 featuring Patricia Wirth. The reception will be held in Avery 348 at 3:30 p.m. with the talk starting in Avery 115 at 4:00 p.m.
“Unbreaking” the Network - Experiences from a Career at AT&T
In January 1991 the AT&T network suffered a devastating outage that lasted for approximately nine hours. The outage caused significant disruptions to business services including 1-800 services and software defined networks around the country. It cost AT&T a minimum of $60 million in lost revenue from calls not to mention the damage to its reputation for supplying reliable service and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity for its customers. This outage still makes almost everyone’s “top ten” list of the most catastrophic software failures and provides interesting lessons that are still relevant today. We will discuss this failure as well as some other iconic examples of network problems that eventually led to better prediction, prevention and proactive management of the AT&T network. Although the perspective of the talk is primarily historical, we will also use these examples as an instructive prism through which we can view some more recent outage incidents with similar characteristics. Finally, we will challenge the audience to think about possible testing signatures for such events.
Dr. Wirth conducted research and made fundamental contributions in the modeling and analysis of telecommunications and computer systems leading to world-class performance of the global AT&T network for which she was named an AT&T Fellow (the first woman to receive AT&T’s highest technical honor), she provided leadership in AT&T Labs to build a world renowned team in the areas of teletraffic theory, performance analysis and network design, her leadership of the AT&T Labs program provided financial and mentoring support to women and minorities pursuing doctorates in the sciences and engineering for which this program was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.