I’d make a better pun, but just about the only things that come to mind when I think of Denmark are Hamlet and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, and I can’t draw. So, here goes:
Tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd
– King Claudius, Hamlet, ACT I Scene 2
In this case, a network performance problem lead to a network fault – a misconfigured “piece of network equipment” in caused “IBM’s network” to be “overwhelmed,” and that disrupted business at many Danish companies. (The quotes are not for emphasis, irony, or skepticism – just to show that the WSJ story was very non-specific about what exactly went wrong.)
Find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
– Lord Polonius, Hamlet. ACT II Scene 2.
Among the consequences: 188 people went without dairy delivery for a day, and bank patrons couldn’t use their ATM cards and had to visit a real-life teller.
For that last one, the International Edition of the Halsingin Sanomat, which I totally reserve as the name of my heavy metal band if I ever start one, was able to get more answers from Sampo Bank, one of the banks affected.
“It was a more extensive malfunction, which meant that the security codes of our cards did not reach their destinations. That is why the cards that needed verification did not work right”, says Sampo’s head of communications Hannu Vuola.
The end result is that Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that many of the affected companies are looking for some sort of compensation from IBM for their trouble. And for a country that is the “world’s most networked country,” a massive network outage is a major problem.
It is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.
– Hamlet, Hamlet, ACT I Scene 4
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