Aussie Road Worker Cleared Over Venus Transit Webcast Interruption

When NASA’s feed of the transit of Venus across the Sun was interrupted, the blame was thrown squarely onto the shoulders of an unnamed council lackey in the Northern Territory who accidentally knocked out services to thousands in the area that day. That blame has now shifted onto the techs at a local school.

Various outlets reported that NASA experienced an interruption in its live, online coverage of the historic transit of Venus that it had hoped to broadcast from cameras that placed at the Centralian Middle School in Alice Springs.

The outage was blamed a local road worker, who on the same day managed to plough a backhoe through a series of fibre cables, knocking out service to thousands.

Investigation of the interruption has found that it was actually the fault of IT staffers on the ground who had issues with the local proxy server.

Telstra spokeswoman Jane de Gault told the Herald-Sun that the road worker was implicated due to the coincidence.

It’s a shame really. If it had been a simple Aussie council worker that had triggered the glitch, the Australian film industry might have given us an excellent sequel to The Dish. [Herald Sun]

Image: NASA, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0


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