Cisco outage caused by human error during maintenance

Wednesday’s three-hour outage on Cisco.com was attributed to human error during preventative maintenance at a data centre, Cisco Systems Inc. said Thursday.

In an update on the outage to its official blog site, Cisco said “human error caused an electrical overload on the systems.”

As a result, the company’s site and a number of other applications went down, Cisco said. Cisco.com appeared to be offline for three hours, from about 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday, according to several users around the U.S. Some users said they had been trying to access the site for training classes or technology specifications for their own Cisco gear.

Cisco said that the severity of the overload also affected redundancy measures that might have kicked in to keep the site running, or bring it back quickly. The company, however, said that the system “shut down as designed to protect the people and the equipment.”

No data was lost and nobody was injured, Cisco said. In an earlier update, Cisco had simply called the outage the result of an “accident” in a San Jose data centre. No details about the exact nature of the error was given.

Cisco also said it has plans already under way to “add additional redundancies to increase the resilience of these systems.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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