Inexperienced Engineer Causes Chaos, Drops Over 4,000 Sessions

A junior network engineer with just three months of experience was sent to a client's site as the Cisco expert, resulting in over 4,000 AS/400 sessions dropping.

Martin, who was part of a small IT infrastructure company, had been tasked with configuring the customer's Nortel kit. He arrived at the site and completed the rack and stack, applied a basic default configuration, and added VLANs as discussed over coffee.

However, during testing, Martin felt 'a disturbance in the force,' as he put it, when the client's IT team informed him that more than 4,000 AS/400 sessions had dropped. Each session had to be killed manually by the client's team over the following hour while Martin watched.

The incident serves as a cautionary tale for the industry, highlighting the risks of sending inexperienced engineers to handle complex tasks alone. According to Uptime Institute's 2022 outage analysis, over 60 percent of outages result in at least $100,000 in total losses. ITIC research also found that hourly downtime costs exceed $300,000 for 91 percent of SME and large enterprises.