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Tom Barry
Software, Human Error, Cause Internet Users Woes
By Therese Poletti
NEW YORK - A software glitch followed by a human error at Network
Solutions Inc., the company that is the exclusive
registrar for the most popular Internet domain names, caused some Net
users sporadic problems Thursday.
The problem was discovered at 2:30 a.m. EDT by Network Solutions and was
fixed four hours later at 6:30 a.m. EDT -- but it
lingered all day, preventing some users from accessing certain Web sites
and snarling e-mail traffic.
Network Solutions, a private company in Herndon, Va., has exclusive
rights to register all Internet addresses with domain
names ending in .com", .gov", .org" and .net".
It was as if the phone book stopped working," said Michael O'Dell, vice
president and chief scientist at major Internet service
provider UUNET Technologies Inc, now owned by WorldCom Inc. If directory
assistance isn't working and you don't have a
phone book, then the phone isn't very useful."
A spokeswoman for Network Solutions said a failure in a company database
occurred early Thursday morning when a new set
of files were being loaded into the system.
The database failure resulted in two files being corrupted. The files,
which a computer system administrator mistakenly
released, resulted in error messages popping up when users tried to
access certain Web sites whose addresses end in .com.
" Many commercial Web sites have .com" addresses.
The Network Solutions directory of Internet domain names, also called
InterNIC, finds the actual servers where a particular
Web site is located.
Some Internet users did not have a hard time accessing sites or data
because if a Web site had been visited very recently, its
address and the path traveled to reach it were still in the temporary
memory of either their Internet service provider or users'
corporate or individual network computers.
Thursday's problem came just a day after a cut in a fiber optic line
disrupted some Internet traffic between Washington and
Baltimore for about six hours, industry executives said.
The incident, which affected the trunk, or backbone" line of major
service provider UUNET, led to spotty outages and
sluggishness, and Internet traffic was rerouted.
A WorldCom spokeswoman said work on a railroad line between the capital
and Baltimore caused the cut in its fiber optic
line.
Earlier this month, Network Solutions filed for an initial public
offering of its stock. The company has been the subject of great
controversy in the industry because of its virtual monopoly to register
Internet addresses. It recently received a request for
documents from the U.S. Justice Department, which is looking into
competition in the Internet address registration business.
Copyright, Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved
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