On the same day Cisco released patches for multiple operating system and software vulnerabilities, the network routing and switching vendor suffered an outage that knocked the Cisco.com offline for about three hours.
The outage, blamed on “human error [that] caused an electrical overload on the systems,” affected support services, including access to the security patches released by Cisco.
The official word, via Cisco’s blog (which survived the outage because it was on a different network):
Service to Cisco.com has been restored and all applications are now fully operational. The issue occurred during preventative maintenance of one of our data centers when a human error caused an electrical overload on the systems. This caused Cisco.com and other applications to go down. Because of the severity of the overload, the redundancy measures in some of the applications and power systems were impacted as well, though the system did shut down as designed to protect the people and the equipment. As a result, no data were lost and no one was injured. Cisco has plans already in process to add additional redundancies to increase the resilience of these systems.
In all, Cisco issued four security advisories an an alert for one security response incident on the day of the outage.
The advisories all affect IOS and one affects Cisco Unified Communications Manager as well. The skinny:
- Cisco IOS Information Leakage Using IPv6 Routing Header
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20070808-IOS-IPv6-leak.shtml - Cisco IOS Next Hop Resolution Protocol Vulnerability
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20070808-nhrp.shtml - Cisco IOS Secure Copy Authorization Bypass Vulnerability
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20070808-scp.shtml - Voice Vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS and Cisco Unified Communications Manager
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20070808-IOS-voice.shtml - Cisco Unified MeetingPlace XSS Vulnerability
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sr-20070808-mp.shtml
* Image from Netcraft’s dynamically updating chart of Cisco.com Web site performance.
