Sunday, July 09, 2006

Major ICT systems failure at Lattelecom?

Much of Lattelecom's high speed DSL internet service and some other functions failed on Friday, July 7 with the service breakdown lasting into Saturday. According to Latvian television, "tens of thousands" of DSL customers were affected and there was disruption of the 1188 information services. Valdis Voncovics, head of network services at Lattelecom, spoke of a "complex failure" but denied that it was related to a hacker attack or the like.
The incident, which I will probably have to do a post-mortem about for my paper, is yet again a signal that any serious internet user has to have a back-up connection. On Friday evening, I was using the Triatel link at my summer house and the only problem I had was getting to the 1188 page. The next day, at a sauna-like meeting in Riga (the Occupation Museum Society), I checked my e-mail with my GPRS phone. For business purposes, an EDGE or 3G device would be better. I didn't know of the DSL breakdown until the news on Saturday evening. More on this, perhaps, later,.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Juris, I suggest that you also take a look at the enermous problems our biggest bank Hansabanka is having with their internetbank. Probably it is worth an article in your pink newspaper? :)
Since the upgrade of the system their servers are more than often down for prolonged time without warning. Systems just switch off etc. Extremely annoying when you want to make fast transfer or need an account statement. All of that during day time, e.g. these are serious issues that their IT staff just is unable to cope with during off-business hours.