Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Software outages strike
Disneyland, media
A virus may be to blame for temporary disruptions at the theme park, CNN, ABC News and The New York Times.
Reuters
An unidentified software virus was being blamed for computer system outages Tuesday at
Disneyland,
ABC News,
CNN and
The New York Times, as computer security companies tried to pin down the cause of the disruption.
Computers at Disneyland were affected, including those used by ticket vendors at the park. Staff members sold tickets manually until the computer systems were brought back up.
"We experienced a very brief interruption with a minimal guest impact, and all systems are up and running," said Jennifer Liu, a Disneyland spokeswoman.
CNN, breaking into regular programming, reported on air that personal computers running
Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system at the cable news network were affected by a worm that caused them to restart repeatedly.
Over the past week, Microsoft and security companies warned of a new worm, called "Zotob," that could allow an attacker to access personal computers by exploiting a recently discovered flaw in Windows 2000.
But security software company
McAfee and
Microsoft said they did not see any heightened activity from Zotob or any indication that the worm caused outages Tuesday at U.S. media outlets.
The New York Times said Tuesday that it had faced internal systems computer outages earlier in the day.
"We just don't have a lot of details," said Catherine Mathis, spokeswoman for the New York Times Co. "It was earlier today. We're fully operational, and we don't expect (the outage) to affect the production of the paper."
Officials at ABC News also reported system outages.
"We haven't seen any huge uptick or impact today," said a spokeswoman with Microsoft's security unit. "A fairly small number of customers are being impacted."
McAfee, the world's second- largest security software maker, said it is investigating whether there was a new worm or virus circulating on the Internet.
"Globally, it doesn't look like there is anything going on," said Lysa Myers, an engineer at McAfee's anti-virus emergency response group.
Myers said that the company had no indication any Internet virus was wreaking havoc around the world and that apparent problems at television networks like CNN could be something more specific to their networks.
CNN, a division of
Time Warner Inc., said computer systems at
General Electric, United Parcel Service and
Caterpillar were affected by system outages as well.
A GE spokesman said there appeared to be no problems with GE's internal network. Meanwhile, UPS said only a small number of its computers were affected by a worm or system outage.
"There is no impact whatsoever on operations, customer- facing computer systems, service or delivery," UPS spokesman Norman Black said.
Caterpillar officials were not immediately available for comment.
ABC is a division of the
Walt Disney Co.
FYI, the DVC computers were down thru the end of business today also.
