UK Government IT upgrade Gone Awry
November 26, 2004 Leave a comment
Just imagine – 60,000 BSOD's. …and it appears that it's not even Microsoft's fault. EDS was set to upgrade a small number of test machines that were running WindowsXP. Instead of deploying the patch to those machines, the patch went to about 80% of all of the machines, which happened to be running Windows 2000. As you may have guessed, the results were less than stellar. With about 60,000 machines being out for over 4 days, you're talking a minimum of 240,000 work hours that were likely, um…less than productive ;) What's amazing to me is that EDS continually seems to botch things (although this mishap was especially egregious) but continues to get new contracts. Although not directly MSFT's fault, you have to wonder how the people that made this decision are feeling right about now.
–jeremy