a question of trust and technology a major government department is without email for a week and technology analyst bill thompson wants to know what happened a couple of weeks ago i wrote about how my girlfriend had suffered when her cable modem blew up and she was offline for several days it seems that thousands of civil servants at the uk s department of work and pensions went through the same thing last week it has emerged that the internal network crashed in a particularly horrible way depriving staff of email and access to the application software they use to calculate people s benefit and pension entitlement or note changes in personal circumstances senior consultants from eds the computer firm which manage the system and microsoft which supplied the software were running around trying to figure out what had to be done to fix it all while staff resorted to phone fax and probably carrier pigeon to get work done fortunately the backoffice systems which actually pay people their money were still working so only new claims and updates were affected done properly this is bad enough for those affected but it does mean that the impact is not devastating for millions of pensioners i am sure regular readers will be expecting one of my usual diatribes against poor software badly specified systems and inadequate disaster recovery plans although the full story has not yet been told it seems that the problem started when a plan to upgrade some of the computers from windows 2000 to windows xp went wrong and xp code was inadvertently copied to thousands of machines across the network this is certainly unfortunate but i have a lot of sympathy for the network managers and technology staff involved today s computer networks are large complex and occasionally fragile the interconnectedness that we all value also gives us a degree of instability and unpredictability that we cannot design out of the systems it is the network equivalent of godel s theorem any system sufficiently complex to be useful is also able to collapse catastrophically so i will reserve judgment on the technology aspects until we all know what actually happened and whether it was a consequence of software failure or just bad luck what is really disturbing and cannot be excused is the fact that it took four days for news of this systems failure to leak out into the technical press it is without a doubt a major story and was the second or third lead item on bbc radio 4 s today programme throughout friday morning so why did not the prime minister s official spokesman mention it at any lobby briefings before friday why was not the pensions minister in parliament to make an emergency statement on tuesday when it was clear that there was a serious problem if there had been an outbreak of legionnaire s disease in the air conditioning system we would have been told but it seems that