Will You Marry Me - 29 February
Computer/Internet/Software Articles
Submit Articles Back to Articles
This is the date when a woman can
propose marriage to a man, turning the traditional tables a full 180
degrees. Unfortunately for Microsoft it also meant a full blown outage
on its Cloud platform named Azure.
Apparently encrypted data sent
between a virtual server and the host system looked up the security
certificate to authenticate the message. Certificates are valid for a
year so the system sought to validate the certificate as at 29 February
2013. As 29 February comes around every four years, there is no
29/02/2013 and the system crashed. Worse was to follow as the system
tried to restart itself and being unable to do so tried to repair and
restart on other parts of the system which also failed, causing a
cascade failure.
I doubt that the system engineers
at Microsoft were in a proposing mood as the outage went on and on for
8 odd hours.
The millennium bug which was
supposed to cause such mayhem as the clocks ticked over to 2000 caused
little concern, but this four yearly event was different. We have
nearly four years to prepare for the next 29 February in 2016. Let us
hope we are all ready.
As an aside, many years ago I had a
call from a Client on 29 February and she told me that it was the day
that women could propose to men and 'what was I going to do about it?'
I was somewhat taken aback as I hardly knew the woman and I was already
married. Fortunately she used the ploy to get a reduction in her annual
contract with my company; how could I refuse?
Business continuity
About the Author
Chris Eden FIBC, MISSA, ACQI is a director of Quality
Matters Limited an established independent management consultancy based
in Essex, UK which specialises in ISO27001 Information Security
Management consultancy.
Follow us @Scopulus_News
Article Published/Sorted/Amended on Scopulus 2012-06-21 11:58:51 in Computer Articles
