Oops! Coping with Human Error in IT Systems

Abstract

Human operator error is one of the most insidious sources of failure and data loss in today’s IT environments. In early 2001, Microsoft suffered a nearly 24-hour outage in its Web properties as a result of a human error made while configuring a name resolution system. Later that year, an hour of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange was disrupted because of a technicians mistake while testing a development system. More recently, human error has been blamed for outages in instant messaging networks, for security and privacy breaches, and for banking system failures.