Originally Posted by
JDNSW
The technical evidence shows that the problem was not someone trying to hack it, but simply that the capacity provided did not equal the capacity required - so everyone trying to log on looked like an attack. They expected something like six million to do it on line, and the ads urged everyone to do it on Tuesday. Their capacity was a million an hour. Should be good? Right! Except that probably three quarters of those trying to do it on line in the eastern states time zone all tried to log on after finishing dinner on Tuesday evening (exactly as the ads told them to).
Several million trying to log on in a half hour period is not going to work at a capacity of a million an hour. To the operators, it looked like an attack, and when the IBM systems started sending an error log to head office, the operators panicked and thought it was a hacker, and shut everything down.
John