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May 16, 2011 By Matt Williams
Michigan state workers were unable to access the state network and their e-mail Monday morning after a systems upgrade to the government’s active service directory knocked out several servers.
Officials thought the overnight upgrade had been successful, but when government employees came to work at 8 a.m., they couldn’t access their e-mail or their saved files on the shared network. Service was restored two and a half hours later when the state was forced to revert to the old, still active directory. The upgrade has been indefinitely postponed.
The computer outage was one of the biggest, longest and most widespread in the state’s history, according to Kurt Weiss, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget.
The state has begun an after-action analysis of the outage’s cause and its impact on the state government. Those findings will be made public in the future, Weiss said.
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You forgot to mention that this was not a 'Computer outage', but a Microsoft Windows outage as Active Directory is used on Windows machines to connect to Windows servers. This has nothing to do with apple or gnu/linux computers, even though they can be added to an active directory model using Likewise. It would seem to me that Microsoft fudged up an update to their already vulnerable servers. Want to save on IT? Don't use Windows.
@Dann: I don't think you understand what you're talking about. They mentioned "active service directory" not Microsoft's Active Directory. You don't actually upgrade AD. And you wouldn't have side-by-side instances with both active. It doesn't work that way. Just another Mac fanboi. Tsk tsk.
As an IT professional... you are entirely wrong. 1) I'm not sure what difference you think there is between a "computer outage" and a "Microsoft Windows outage" as they are entirely the same thing in this case. 2) This falls on whoever was in charge of the upgrade who clearly failed to validate the system before employees showed up to work. 3) As far as saving on IT, would you suggest that the state pay twice as much for similarly-powered Macs or train average Joes--who might not even have a personal computer at home--on how to use Linux? Yeah, I didn't think so. There's a point where it stops being Microsoft's fault and starts being the user's fault. This falls into the latter category.
Microsoft must have only messed up the updates to the Michigan versions of their servers. Because, you know, my Massachusetts versions seem to be running okay. SO WEIRD!
As much as I despise Microsoft's sloppy code and poor configuration management, I have to say this is not on them. When you're standing at an ATM and can't get your lunch money, you don't care if it's a network, mainframe or ATM problem. It ain't working...an yes, it's pretty basic to have users check to see if everything is OK before you start up on Monday, and fall back right away if you can - major PM failure on this one.