Tuesday 15 March 2011

London Olympics Countdown clock stops.



This is why you must think about Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in everything you do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12749912

The clock unveiled less than 24 hours ago is now stuck. Its a public statement of the London Olympics Committee - which clearly says we will fail.


The best part is that this is a digital count down clock. I remeber that as a 7 year old i used to build IC555 timer circuits which took less than 10 minutes to put together. Although this does not use an IC555 as things have moved on, how hard could it have been to have parallel timer circuits, ready to take over when one circuit went down?

I am simply surprised why the contractor is not already on site, rather than letting this become a news field day. I guess its due to a lack of proper DR process and poor SLA, they probably thought nothing could go wrong with a clock.

Lets hope the actual games have more luck and that the Olympics committee does have proper Business Continuity plans in place.

UPDATE: The OMEGA Clock is now working, but this is a PR Disaster for Omega.

UPDATE: The clock is NOW undergoing thorough testing.... after the faileur. Very poor Programme Management and Testing Strategy by the Olymics Porgramme.

BBC News

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