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"In all my years, I've never seen anything like this," said
Price Stern Sloan system administrator Andrew Walton, whose
effort to restore web service to his company's network
was repeatedly hampered by employees busily working at
their computers. "The local-access network is functioning,
so people can transfer work projects to one another, but
there's no e-mail, no eBay, no flaminglips.com. It's pretty
much every office worker's worst nightmare."
According to Samuel Kessler, senior director at
Symantec, which makes the popular Norton Antivirus
software, the Internet "basically collapsed" Monday
at 8:34 a.m. EST.
The Gibe-F worm, an e-mail-transmittable virus,
initiated cascading server failures. Within an
hour, Internet service to more than 90 percent
of the U.S. was disabled, either by the worm or
by network firewalls that initiated security protocols.
"Unlike SoBig or Blaster, this worm didn't harm
individual computers; it just used them as a gate
to attack the Internet at the ISP level," Kessler
said. "Computer technicians at most offices couldn't
do anything but sit by helplessly as people worked
through stacks of filing, wrote business-related
letters they'd put off for months, and sold record
amounts of goods and services over the phone."
Shortly after office workers found their web,
e-mail, and instant-messaging capabilities disabled,
reports of torrential productivity began to reach
corporate offices nationwide.
"My first thought was 'My God, this has to be
some kind of mistake,'" said Prudential Insurance
executive vice-president Shane Mullins of San Francisco. "My
e-mail wasn't working. Nerve.com wasn't working.
I eventually found out that the company web site
wasn't working, either. But by that time, my inbox
was filling up like you wouldn't believe."
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Above: The Internet
outage forced a Minneapolis couple to tackle a task
they'd put off for months.
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"My actual physical inbox," Mullins added. "It's this
gray plastic thing on my desktop—the top of the desk
I sit at."
With workers denied access to ESPN.com, Salon, Fark.com,
and Friendster, employers struggled to keep up with the
sudden increase in efficiency.
"Our office was working at roughly 95 percent efficiency," said
Steven Glover, an advertising executive and creative team
leader at Rae Jaynes Houser. "It's problematic to have
the rate jump like that—it sets a precedent that
will be impossible to maintain once the Internet comes
back."
Glover said his department failed to reach 100 percent
productivity only because employees stopped work every
few minutes throughout the outage to see if Internet service
had been restored.
"This is terrible," said Miami resident Ron Lewison, an
employee at Gladstone Finance and an Amazon.com Top 500
Reviewer. "For two days, I've been denied access to the
vital information I need to go about my workday. In the
absence of that information, I've been forced to go about
my job."
According to Labor Department statistics, companies
affected by the Internet outage generated an estimated
$4 to $6 billion in extra revenue.
"Losses to online retail companies will be considerable, " said
Jae Miles, senior financial economist at Banc One
Capital Markets in Chicago. "Nevertheless, the outage's
overall impact on the national economy will be a
positive one. The losses should be easily offset
by the gains to companies that depend primarily on
people finishing actual work."
As of press time, many administrators had begun
to apply a patch that combats the Gibe-F worm.
"Thank God, Earthlink service is back, and with
it, online shopping and entertainment news," office
worker Emily Jaynes said at 7 p.m. Tuesday. "I'm
ready to head home now. I couldn't bear to spend
another evening repainting furniture and using my
pool."
Financial experts say they hope to have detailed
data on the economic impact of the outage within
the next 24 hours.
"When American office workers are denied access
to vast, complex streams of ever-fluctuating and
evolving information, they tend to get a lot done," said
Nicole Dansby, a business-information analyst employed
by the New York Stock Exchange. "The extended Internet
outage may or may not have had something to do with
the Dow's 278-point jump Tuesday. I'll have to, you
know, check the web for a few hours and get back
to you." |
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