If we told people then pretty soon everyone would know

It's this pilot fish's on-call week, so naturally his phone rings at 4:30 a.m. with a call from an operations staffer in the data center.

"The servers are down," staffer says in a shaky voice.

Fish knows there are about 45 of them. Which servers? he asks.

Staffer: "All of them."

Now fish is fully awake. What happened? he asks. Did someone push the big red button? Was there a power failure?

"No, the lights, phones and most of the workstations are still working," staffer says. "But the UPS is beeping."

Fish sends a quick message to the IT infrastructure team and to IT management: "All servers down." Then he hustles in to the data center to see what's going on.

And it doesn't take long to track down the source of the disruption.

One of the jobs of the operations staff is to periodically record the voltage levels from the UPS, using the control panel for the UPS.

Turns out a staffer somehow managed to get into a maintenance menu and activated a load test -- which tripped the circuit breakers for the main power input, as well as in the battery circuit.

"Management was not aware of any such menu and was not pleased with the UPS vendor for allowing anyone at the control panel to run such a disruptive test," fish sighs.

"The vendor responded that the menu is supposed to be password protected -- rather difficult to do when its very existence is unknown."

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