Remember a few posts back, I told you about a study of the Net. If only four percent of the major routers on the Net were affected by a delay attack, the Net would be brought to it's knees, and effectively disconnect from itself.
The actual number wasn't four percent. It was eighteen. And it was reached by accident.
I'm not sure where it started. Most people thought there would be a big problem with computers at the Millennium, with all the systems breaking down due to Y2K problems. But that potential problem was recognized, and everyone had done the necessary work to eliminate the Y2K problem. Sure, there were some incidents, but they were very isolated, and the effect was small.
As near as I can tell, it started to get out of control in July. There were some isolated incidents before then. The "denial of service" attacks were related to it. Outages on E-Bay, Amazon, E*Trade, even AOL were part of it, even though the 'spin doctors' blamed it on a software upgrade or teenage hackers. Those attacks were stopped, but only temporary.
You know what happened in July. There were problems with the stock exchange systems, which couldn't transfer data across the Net fast enough. Traders, especially considering the explosion of day-traders, couldn't make their trades fast enough, which made the stock market indexes decline even more.
Then the problem got into the Business to Business systems. Data wasn't being transferred between them, so orders got delayed, shipments didn't make it on time, production slowed down. Workers were laid off. The economy took a slow tank.
And then the banks got hit. The banks used the Net (even though it was a private part of the Net, the packet delay program got into there too) to connect all those ATM machines to their systems. When the Net died, that was when the Problem really hit home. The economy's 'slow tank' turned into a 'big tank'.
Businesses could survive a short interruption in their data. But when the ATM's died, that was a big Problem.
You remember when the ATM's died, right? We all used to use out ATM's for everything. People didn't carry cash anymore. We used our ATM cards everywhere. At restaurants, fast food, department stores, grocery stores, gas stations. When the ATMs didn't work, nobody could buy anything.
And that's when the real Problem started.