Blaz: Just a safety glitch
Mayor de Blasio sees no reason for residents to panic over a glitch that rattled the city’s wireless network and affected traffic lights at 13,000 intersections.
“It’s a serious impact (but) it’s not an overwhelming impact,” the mayor said Thursday. “I think most New Yorkers could say they didn’t even know it happened in terms of their daily lives.”
A Y2K-like bug known as the “GPS Rollover” hit the city’s NYCWiN system on April 6, affecting the remote monitoring of traffic lights, stand alone license plate readers monitored by the NYPD, wireless water meter readers and other aspects of the city’s infrastructure.
The Global Positioning System keeps track of time in weekly intervals and every 1,024 weeks, or roughly 20 years, that time-keeping system resets itself, which sometimes causes problems on wireless networks.
Stephanie Raphael, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, confirmed Wednesday that the rollover took down “elements” of the system.
“No critical public safety systems are affected by this brief software installation period and we’ve taken several steps to make up for the disruption to the few isolated tools affected,” she said.
The glitch knocked out 40 NYPD license plate readers placed on major intersections and bridges. Cops quickly compensated by assigning patrol cars with mobile license plate readers, officials said.
There were no other disruptions in the NYPD services, a spokesman said.
De Blasio said he wants to know why the GPS Rollover affected the city’s wireless network.
“There’s some global dynamics here that affect the situation,” the mayor said. “We have to understand what happened here, what was done right and what was done wrong and make adjustments. So we’ll know that — after we address the immediate situation — we’ll do that diagnostic and see what we have to do differently.”
De Blasio said he was briefed “when we saw the problem start to emerge on Sunday.”
“We’re going to do the diagnostic, figure out what was missed and fix it,” he added. The NYCWiN snafu did have one unexpected upside — it helped save a life, officials said.
A cop sent to the 145th St. Bridge in Harlem with a mobile license plate reader to replace the one that winked out spotted a man trying to jump from the Manhattan side of the span about 4 a.m. Wednesday.
The cop approached the despondent man, who said he wanted to kill himself as he climbed the chain link fence in an attempt to jump, officials said.
The officer grabbed the would-be jumper, who was taken to Harlem Hospital for evaluation.