A Very Long Read That Only Makes One More Concerned About The Safety And Reliability Of Critical Systems – In Healthcare and Elsewhere.

This appeared a little while ago.The Coming Software ApocalypseA small group of programmers wants to change how we code —before catastrophe strikes.Lynn Scurfield There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break i nto her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number,... This is the initial part of the post - read more by clicking on the title of the article. David.
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: blogs