When America Goes Offline, It’s Time for Rethinking
Online service providers, in their early glitch-prone days, knew that a system crash would, at worst, provoke a few “flames”--biting e-mail criticisms--from their subscribers. But when America Online became America Offline for nearly 19 hours Wednesday, many thousands among its 6 million subscribers around the world were up in arms. It was the most extensive network blackout yet in cyberspace.
The degree to which business leaders in particular had come to depend on AOL surprised many at the online provider, the world’s largest. Its traditional users have been a more leisurely lot interested in entering “chat rooms” and browsing travel guides.
AOL made the mistake of overhauling both its software and its hardware on the same day, an especially injudicious move, according to online technical analysts like Robert Seidman. And after the trouble hit, the company ought to have found a better way to update its customers than delivering only this message: “Please try again in 15 minutes. Thank you for calling.”
However, the deeper issue raised by the AOL crash is the failure of business and government to grapple seriously with the problems generated by the growing worldwide dependence on online information.
The consequences of that reluctance were underscored Thursday when the Analysts International Corp. announced the formation of a business unit to help companies solve “the year 2000 problem.” For many months, computer analysts have been warning business that without extensive programming intervention, much existing computer software will treat the year 2000 as though it were 1900, resulting in what some say will be disastrous breakdowns. Doomsayers predict that when the New Year’s Eve ball descends to the bottom at the start of 2000, many computers will see the zeros and, finding nothing in their programming to the contrary, assume that William McKinley is president once more.
Had the United States possessed an agency to oversee the dilemmas raised by new information technologies, businesses would not now find themselves with a dearth of experts trained to address the year 2000 problem. An oversight agency also could study other troubles on the horizon. For instance, there are many plans now to use “Intranets” to enable a company to communicate with its employees over commercial lines not owned by that company. The “firewall” or security problems posed by the Intranet are formidable and still largely untackled.
There is an amusing irony behind Wednesday’s AOL failure. On April Fool’s Day, AOL greeted its users with a headline saying that life had been discovered on Jupiter. Given that AOL’s system crashed on the day that NASA formally announced its belief that life probably existed on Mars, whimsical thinkers are bound to wonder whether some envious Jovian bugs sailed into AOL’s computers this week to exact their just revenge.
