HEADLINE: Duplex Mismatch Strands Travelers at LAX

So maybe that's a little dramatic, but my friend AquaRapid forwarded this NY Times article to me today that discusses complexity in computing systems and networks and how the complexity itself is often a greater threat to the stability of the system than a malicious hacker might be:

Who Needs Hackers

From the article:

NOTHING was moving. International travelers flying into Los Angeles International Airport — more than 17,000 of them — were stuck on planes for hours one day in mid-August after computers for the United States Customs and Border Protection agency went down and stayed down for nine hours.

Hackers? Nope. Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer. The flawed card slowed the network and set off a domino effect as failures rippled through the customs network at the airport, officials said.

It's hard to imagine how a computer on someone's desk could be depended upon by such an important system for anything, but there you go. Duplex problem? Broadcast storm on a production non-properly segmented network? Who knows, but complexity is a very real problem that the maintainer of a large scale system has to deal with.