Next time, they'll check the calendar

Posted by matsublog

Posted: June 13, 2008 - 1:16 pm

From Palmer reporter T.C. Mitchell:

A scheduled maintenance upgrade by Matanuska Telephone Association went awry about 6 a.m., denying service to some 3,000 customers.

As of 12:10 p.m. today, service was starting to come back on line, said Jackie Kenshalo, public relations manager for MTA. By 4:30 p.m., service was nearly 100 percent, she said.

MTA was upgrading 10 boxes, kind of like memory cards, and the 10th one failed, Kenshalo said this morning.

The boxes, she said, route phone calls, so anything related to phone service was cut off, including Internet service through MTA dial-up connections. Many other services were affected as well.

Customers who wanted to slide a card at the gas pump couldn’t do it, so they either had to have cash or use “the knuckle-buster” credit card slides at the cashier as one gas station attendant said.

Automated teller machines were also down.

“We tried to put the old information back in the boxes,” Kenshalo said, “But that didn’t work.”

MTA was working with its software vendor, Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J., to get the system back on line.

Palmer, hosting its annual Colony Days celebration, seemed most affected, but Kenshalo said the outage was “widespread and random.”
The upgrade, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., was not announced because if all went well no one would have noticed, she said.

“I hate to say it, but we scheduled a software upgrade on Friday the 13th,” Kenshalo said.

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