Who's To Blame For NYC's Wireless Network Failure Last Weekend?
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The city's tech managers are in damage control mode after a screw-up with potentially serious consequences.
The city is scrambling to get the New York City wireless network up and running again after it crashed over the weekend.
Because of the outage, city traffic lights can't be remotely controlled. Many traffic cameras are out, along with some NYPD license plate readers.
The city apparently ignored warnings that this wireless outage was coming. A year ago, the Department of Homeland Security warned that a reset of a global positioning system would require software updates to prevent problems.
READ: Warning Memorandum From Homeland Security
Both the Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Samir Saidi, and the Deputy Mayor for Operations Laura Anglain did respond to request for answers on Thursday.
When the crash came Saturday, nobody was informed.
"The first time I heard about this was from the media," said Council member Brad Lander who sits on the Technology Committee. He wants a hearing on the fiasco.
"We're paying $37 million a year to Northrup Grumman for this system, their job is to keep the system functional. They failed to do that, and it's time for a deeper dive and oversight on this whole nice (NYCWin) system."
Mayor Bill de Blasio could not answer who should be held responsible for preventing the crash from happening in the first place, but said he would investigate.
"We're going to do a whole diagnostic," he said Thursday. "As you could imagine, there are all sorts of technical things that don't get to the CEO level."
The NYPD says it has not experienced any disruption to operations, and the network should be back by the weekend.