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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

2001-09-11 08:46:46 Arch [1612975] D ALPHA PAGE FROM lifeline: alert 8933585 ETS appl nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com ETS RTCE: - Market data inconsistent...Cantor API problem Trading system offline on nbetpsd27.fi.gs.com, run by etsuser on nbetpsd27, pid = 24277

"The hijackers flew the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m."

"Cantor Fitzgerald was formerly based in the World Trade Center and was the company hardest hit by the September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed all 658 of its employees who were in the office at the time (out of 960 who were based there)."

First signs of trouble was a financial trading API.

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These were kicking around some time after it happened. I remember reading the first Cantor network failure messages then - they brought the tragedy home to me more than the TV images and statistics had.

They made it human - I could imagine an event, at one of the buildings I'd worked at, wiping out an entire floor - everyone in it and everything connected to it - left me cold and reading it again now I feel just the same.

It's odd that a bot saying "Network Failure" really brings it home more than live images etc. Maybe it's because we are very technically oriented individuals, or is it a wider thing?

Pictures of faces and buildings with which we aren't acquainted likely remain abstract to most people; however, a remote system that was directly related to a person's daily work is something concrete. It doesn't take much of an imagination to go from that server disappearing to realizing that the people who maintain it's various elements are gone as well.

Not surprising really - out of all the systems humans run - the ones most ready for disaster generally are finance, power and telecommunications. This is just because all these systems need ~100% up time with no QOS degradation while needing to deal with massive variability in use (extremely elastic and subject to thundering herds).

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