Computer ghosts, spooky networking systems and possessed servers; now we’ve found the most horrifying story of all. In honor of Halloween, we asked you to share your real-life IT horror story to send chills down our spines. We’ve compared your eerie tales and have found the most horrifying response. Here’s the winner of a Surface RT and their scary story:
Grand prize winner:
The tale of the possessed Internet connection
As a Network Support Engineer at a company whose services are IT reseller and managed services, it was my duty to replace a firewall with a newer model. I configured it with the exact same information as the one that was in place, so that when I would go and make the change, the network would only be down for no more than five minutes.
Next, I plugged the new firewall in to give it a couple of minutes to boot before I moved over the Ethernet cables. After I moved over the ethernet cables, I tested it all just to see if everything was working. But after two to three minutes went by, there was still no Internet. People were screaming at me because the Internet was down longer than what should have been.
To temporarily solve the horrifying no-Internet problem, I put the old firewall back in place so I could figure out what the issue was with the new firewall. Unfortunately, the Internet never came back online, even with the old firewall back in place.
Since that didn’t work, I figured I’d put the new firewall back in place again to see if I could get the Internet back on with the new firewall rather than the old firewall. Still nothing happened.
After troubleshooting it for a couple more minutes I unplugged both the new firewall and the router and plugged them both back in, and this time around everything started to work again.
The whole ordeal lasted close to half an hour. It’s a horror story for me because the Internet was down longer than it was supposed to. The Internet was down for our office and for all the customers in the building who use our Internet connection.