[DittoJed2]

Whatcha all think?

[woofie]

I think it was the internet worm

[MEG33]

I think we don't know yet!The theories are interesting but this will take time to sort out.The primary problem is the safety measures not working to protect against this cascading major outages.

[stylin19a]

Homer Simpson at the controls ?

[Samwise]

[JOE6PAK]

WORM. The internet went nuts at the same time. AMTRAK still FUGED UP! Another set to run today. IM signing off till Monday.

...well till Saturday morning anyway.

[r9etb]

I think it will turn out to be a three to five unrelated, relatively normal, no-big-deal-by-itself, things that happened to be going on at the same time.

I've seen multi-cause errors a number of times in the space business, where unrelated problems come together to make life very interesting.

[BenLurkin]

In Ohio:

"Atomic Rocket Vehicle Performance Improved"

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT1999/5000/5830palaszewski2.html

[Chief Engineer]

This situation is beginning to look a lot like the Big Northeast Power Failure of the 60s.

After that failure, they determined that the overloads of the interconnect lines were set too high, allowing an abnormally large load in one part of the system to drag other systems down. The talk of overloaded power lines heating enough to strech and sag, and one part of the system draging down another, sounds like the overloads were set too high.

In the event of an overload in one section of the interconnected system, the interconnect lines are supposed to interrupt, isolating the problem to one small area.

After the 60s event, all the overload relays in the system were adjusted to lower values, to enable the system to shed the problem areas as it was supposed to.

Over the years, I suppose that overloads were increased so as to not be a bother.

[Captain Beyond]

bump

[Dolphy]

Multiple Failures

PJM Interconnection and American Electric, among others, sealed themselves off from FirstEnergy keeping the lights on in Boston, Philadelphia and other cities. This article says Detroit didn't seal themselves off which spread into Ontario and then New York. Though they don't say, it seems like Ontario and New York should have also separated themselves.

I can buy that FirstEnergy failed on a large scale. (There are various stories of their persistent shortcomings in recent months.) But how does that explain Michigan, Ontario and New York failing while PJM and others were able to separate themselves?

[DittoJed2]