Heathrow, Gatwick Airports Affected by ATC Outage

A brief report of the air traffic control software failure in an operations center in the south of England appears on softwareqc.com. Around 40 flights were cancelled at Heathrow alone.

Glitch Detected Overnight Takes Down Healthcare.gov

Today was the deadline for many Americans to sign up for health insurance through federal programs or face a possible penalty. Unfortunately for East Coast and early bird users seeking to sign up today. an overnight problem was detected and the site remained down after scheduled maintenance. As the NY Times reported, the first prime time hours were unavailable to visitors. After the problem was reported as fixed, the site was available, though it did experience subsequent capacity problems in the afternoon. The Times also reported increased wait times at walk-in centers as well as at the web site.

HealthCare.gov on March 31, 2014

iPhone Contract Perk May Have Sunk AT&T Servers

Some days or months before the iPhone 4 announcement that transpired today, it's clear that Apple and AT&T very likely had a number of planning sessions. The result was an agreement by AT&T to offer a number of iPhone customers currently under contract an option to upgrade to iPhone 4 this month. The unsurprising result was undoubtedly a peak in traffic to the AT&T iPhone account management server page.  The surprising result was that, despite the advance planning, the AT&T site may have been unprepared for the traffic.

According to a Computerworld post by Gregg Keizer, the result was that the site could was either taken offline intentionally or, probably more likely, could not handle the volume.