Oops! Coping with Human Error in IT Systems
Aaron B. Brown · Queue · 2004
Human operator error is one of the most insidious sources of failure and data loss in today’s IT environments. In early 2001, Microsoft suffered a nearly 24-hour outage in its Web properties as a result of a human error made while configuring a name resolution system. Later that year, an hour of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange was disrupted because of a technicians mistake while testing a development system. More recently, human error has been blamed for outages in instant messaging networks, for security and privacy breaches, and for banking system failures.