New Years Text Messages Got Delayed
This is something to take a look at, as we start to use cell phones, and email, for more important tasks. In this story, New Years Eve revelers sent out text messages in large numbers. These text messages, sent all at once, caused a logjam on the servers and some of the messages were delayed for quite some time, or bounced alltoghether. This is fine for New Years eve messages, but in an emergency it could be deadly.
I’ve often thought that people should be careful when they rely on technology during emergencies. This goes to prove the point that you need to ensure that the system is fail-safe before using it for any emergency. Schools are starting to try to use technology to disseminate information to parents via cell phones. This is a great idea for things that are important, but not life or death. Colleges have started to use these systems to help avoid another tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings. The thought is that if they could have closed down the classes faster and more efficiently after the first shooting, they could have saved further lives of students that were in classes later that day. This is a great idea, but it should be taken with some caution. This may have various problems during larger emergencies. If there were a large scale emergency it could knock out some of the communications. It could also cause a logjam on the servers that will block the message from being recieved like in this article.
A secondary issue is that, perhaps terrorists could send out floods to servers and cause them to go offline in a Denile of Service (DoS) attack. They could do this in a coordinated effort with say bombing a site with a large number of people. This could have devastating effect.
I wonder if cell phone technology should have some form of secondary high priority circuit that will get emergency data through quicker.
Personally I think we need to go back to the WWII air raid sirens. I don’t trust any technology to work right every time, all the time. Maybe I’m biased because of my years working with personal computers. Servers can be built to work on a fail-safe, but there is always a point of failure, the question is just ‘how bad does it have to be to fail?’
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