Phone compter ‘crashed’ by elusive gremlins

Press, 21 July 1988, Page 3

Phone compter ‘crashed’ by elusive gremlins

By

DAVID CLARKSON

When the computer controlling Christchurch’s central city telephone exchange tripped out eight times yesterday, callers discovered that even the faults service is not immune from gremlins.

By 9.30 a.m. the telephone exchange was running normally, but the faults service was knocked out until 11.30 a.m. “That really caused chaos,” said the Telecom district manager, Mr Brian Finn. “Because people were not able to call in on the faults lines, they called on every Telecom line they could find.” Thousands of calls flooded in during the morning, he said. ' ■ The problem began after Telecom decided to install a computer programme • that would “queue up” the telephone calls received by its faults service so that they could be answered in order. The faults service sometimes receives 36,000 calls a month. When the new computer programme was started at 8 a.m., a problem occurred that has still not been traced. “Something happened within the computer that it didn’t like and it closed down on us,” Mr Finn said. All callers were cut off, and the telephone system remained disrupted for two minutes while the computer automatically restarted itself. Mr Finn said technicians in the exchange may have sped up the restarting process.

But the system “crashed” seven more times before 9.30 a.m., and with the faults service completely knocked out, subscribers who tried to report the problems caused even more chaos for Telecom. “The exchange reset itself and we did some software changes to allow the faults service to get cracking again, at 11.30 a.m.,” he said. Telecom in Christchurch had the New Zealand Telecommunications Support Centre in Wellington on line, trying to fix the problem, but it could not be traced. The centre sent two people to Christchurch in the afternoon to try to find out what was wrong. They were yesterday examining the computer printouts. Mr Finn said the loss of the telephone system in the central city was “a terrible thing to happen,” but it was not the worst fault Telecom has faced in the city this year. The exchange closed for a long time on a Saturday morning two months ago. The isolated problems are being solved as they occur, but Mr Finn said Telecom was investigating in detail to find whether there was some fault deep in the computer.