
Ask HN: Likelihood the NYC Power Outage Was a Software Bug? - bensayingthat
I just realized yesterday&#x27;s NYC power outage happened exactly 42 years after the 1977 NYC blackout. It got me thinking about whether yesterday&#x27;s event is likely a software bug--maybe  some sort of buffer overflow that took 42 years to build up. (I have literally no idea.)<p>It seems Con Ed has no idea what caused the blackout. Do you think it could be a software bug? If so, what type of bug would take 42 years to present itself?
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detaro
Even if it is a software bug, it being related to the power outage 42 years
ago seems _very_ unlikely.

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greenyoda
In particular, it's very unlikely that the software that utilities run today
is similar to the software that was running 42 years ago. In 1977, even a big
mainframe only had a few megs of memory.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_303X#IBM_3033](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_303X#IBM_3033)
(the top-of-the line IBM mainframe as of 1977 had 4 to 8 megs of RAM and 64K
of cache).

