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Galaxy IV and the risks of efficient technologies
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Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 10:49:29 -0700 (PDT) From: risks@csl.sri.com
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Thursday 21 May 1998 Volume 19 : Issue 75
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Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 10:03:39 -0400 (EDT) From: royrod@cc.gatech.edu (Roy Rodenstein) Subject: Galaxy IV malfunction causes massive pager outages
Around 6PM on Tuesday, May 20th the Galaxy IV satellite's "onboard control system and a backup switch failed." The satellite reportedly provided pager service to 80%+ of US customers, and also carried NPR, several television networks, and Reuters news feeds. A spokesman for PanAmSat (which owns the satellite) has said contact does exist with the satellite but has not said how soon service can be restored- apparently one option is to use a backup satellite already in orbit, but it could take several days to reposition it.
This is a single-point-of-failure case with a twist. Although Galaxy IV reportedly had a backup system it failed, which might make one wonder how thoroughly backup systems are tested. If 80%+ of pagers in the US have been affected, this is quite an egregious case of SPOF. On the other hand, from the point of view of PanAmSat, adding points of failure for services in space is not the same as doing so for services on earth. As for pager companies, given that CBS quickly switched to Galaxy 7, perhaps their backup plans were not as robust as they could have been.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9805/20/satellite.outage/
Roy Rodenstein, royrod@cc.gatech.edu Future Computing Lab, GVU Center, Georgia Tech
[Also noted by many others. This case certainly brings up a lot of
issues discussed here previously. The event occurred just as my plane
was leaving Dulles after my Senate testimony on infrastructural risks
and vulnerabilities
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Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 17:36:44 -0500
From: Richard Cook
It will take some time to gauge the complete impact of the loss of a communications satellite Galaxy IV. Some technical details of the narrow locus of failure are available at PanAmSat (http://www.panamsat.com). The event will certainly be expensive if control of the satellite cannot be reestablished. But more difficult to calculate are the larger costs of the disruption of service. Particularly troubling is the loss of paging services used for hospitals including (according to news reports) Johns Hopkins and others.
Radio news reports suggested that hospitals and other services were retreating to simple telephone communications. It is unlikely that such a retreat would be feasible. The widespread use of paging systems has produced a highly distributed system that is nearly entirely dependent on these methods of establishing communications. Work patterns themselves are now distributed in hospitals in ways that make operation without paging systems effectively impossible. Some hospitals in which I work no longer have any overhead voice paging capability at all and the huge volumes of paging for virtually every possible service and activity make even those archaic remnants of a previous time woefully inadequate.
The outage points out the subtle dependencies that flow from the applications of larger scale, highly integrated technologies, especially the boundaries of failure. The benefits of these modern systems are largely in efficiencies of work that they permit. When they fail, the impact can extend in space and time far beyond the obvious, first order 'edges' of the system. Hence, the term coined above: the "narrow locus of failure". This is the technical system and its well defined and readily apparent functions. In this incident, the NLF is the satellite and the pagers and the gasoline pumps and the television nets, and so forth. But the larger locus of failure here would include all the subsequent and serial effects. These are especially difficult to describe completely because of they are so distributed and diverse.
Predecessor systems were not robust, of course. Hard wired telephones failed and the local doctor-in-the-hospital [not for nothing were they called `residents'!] could be overwhelmed by the demands of a single ward or floor. What was distinct about these earlier systems was the narrowly restricted boundaries of their failure. The failure of a local telephone system or a local resident was limited in scope. Not so with the new systems. That this sort of failure occurs shoudl give us real pause as we consider the various proposals to use advanced technology for medical applications.
There are a host of proposals to use advanced information technology for electronic medical records, for so called 'telemedicine', for remote robotic surgery, for drug dispensing and monitoring, for home infusion, etc. etc. These applications are always touted by proselytizers as advances in quality or capability to be employed for improved performance. But the history of technological applications shows that these advances are exploited mainly to achieve greater efficiencies in production, and that the gains are quickly eaten up by this use. That is to say, the advances are exploited not to achieve a more robust system but a more efficient one -- and one with the potential for large scale, catastrophic modes of failure. The example of Galaxy IV is a demonstration of the potential of such highly technical systems.
Richard I. Cook, MD, Cognitive Technologies Lab., Dept of Anesthesia and Critical Care, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 1+773-702-5306
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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 19.75
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