This is an excerpt of the article Catastrophes as a Result of Bad Software Engineering written by Jakob H., Andre K. and myself. In this section, I will elaborate on the causes of the North-American Power Blackout from a software engineering perspective.

• Read the section covering the 2003 power blackout here in html

• Or download the full paper here as PDF.

I am publishing this section of the paper here (and also on Wikipedia), because it was hard to find any computer science related information about this case on the internet (some might say it has been concealed well…). In my opinion, also the NERC Report¹⁾ lacks on information about the influence of the computer failure.

Some very good blog entries about this topic were posted by Bret Pettichord on his blog Testing Hotlist Update.