Posted on 11/04/2009 7:06:39 AM PST by Braak
A power outage at Metro's headquarters has led to massive problems systemwide, allowing people to ride some buses for free and shutting down WMATA's Web site, call center and e-mail alert system.
Metro said it experienced a power outage at about 2:45 a.m. that took down the data center responsible for communication functions. Besides the Customer Call Center not being able to make or receive calls, Metro said the following problems have developed:
Some Metrobus fareboxes are not functioning and if that is the case, customers are being allowed to ride without paying a fare.
The NextBus system is not functioning;
The Bus Operations Control Center is having difficulty communicating with buses on the street.
The following systems are not functioning in the MetroAccess system at this time:
The MetroAccess online reservation system is not functioning;
The MetroAccess call center is not able to make or receive calls;
The MetroAccess Operations Control Center is having difficulty communicating with vehicles on the street.
The following systems are not functioning in the Metrorail system at this time:
Customers are not able to purchase fare with their debit cards.
Customers are limited to charge up to $20 only using a credit card at fare machines.
The e-alert system is not functioning.
The public address system is not functioning.
There is no timetable for when the system will be back online, according to WMATA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein, but the WMATA Web site did return at about 8:30 a.m. The site is not able to be updated, however.
Even More Transit Problems Meanwhile, the traffic management computer system in Montgomery County went down at about 3 a.m., causing traffic lights to not synchronize and instead operate in non-rush mode. The change has created numerous backups during the morning commute.
Lights that are usually extended green are not.
Traffic management operators can't monitor the system because there is no communication. Lights in Rockville and Takoma Park are running correctly because they are on different systems.
I hope the terrorists aren’t watching...what a disgrace. Look how easy it is to bring an entire city to a halt.
Die Hard 4?
Probing, testing?
Ctrl-Alt-Del?
Who knows? Could be as simple as some idiot dropped a wrench.
merlin ping
Washington power meltdown ping.
This might sound strange but last night, we had outages with our cell phones. T Mobile had trouble and other people we know who had different cell providers were also experiencing outages/problems.
Weird...very weird.
Do they not have battery back ups and generators in their data centers?
Been on WMAL all morning. Only Rockville and Takoma Park in Monkey County were affected it says. They are north and east.
All is well in The People’s Republic of Bethesda. :o)
Could it be that the White House is attemting to make our
“house call” a lot more difficult to navigate?
Gov run socialist systems are prone to failure.
Thanks!
Is everything back to normal yet?
I don’t know, we don’t use the metro and the lights affected aren’t around us.
Are you going to the Chris Plante party tomorrow?
No, I’m not. I’m heading to Puerto Rico tomorrow until Sunday. It seems that they schedule these things when I’m going out-of-town or something.
The event is in Bethesda... are you going?
In many cases, there is rudimentary or no security on the actual packet control protocol, so anyone who can send packets to the SCADA device can control it.
In many cases SCADA users assume that a VPN is sufficient protection and are unaware that physical access to SCADA-related network jacks and switches provides the ability to totally bypass all security on the control software and fully control those SCADA networks.
These kinds of physical access attacks bypass firewall and VPN security and are best addressed by endpoint-to-endpoint authentication and authorization such as are commonly provided in the non-SCADA world by in-device SSL or other cryptographic techniques."
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