The credit rating agency Moody's uses mathematical models to determine which investments will offer investors the best returns. The firm's highest rating, AAA, tells investors that they have a very low probability of losing any money.

"However, the triple A ratings that Moody’s awarded to some early deals were based on a model that contained an error in its computer coding, and these ratings should have been up to four notches lower," the Financial Times article states. "Billions of dollars could have been affected."

According to an article in the Economic Times, Moody's is reviewing the situation. That same article notes that "Some senior staff at Moody’s were aware in early ‘07" of the incorrect rating on "constant proportion debt obligations" and that "the allegations raise questions about internal controls at credit ratings firms as they face scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators for assigning their top grades to securities derived from loans to people with poor credit."

ZDNet's IT Project Failures blog sums up the situation as follows:

"Moody’s mathematical bug, exacerbated by management’s delay acknowledging the problem, caused the company’s stock price to drop substantially, may spark a federal investigation, and hurt innocent investors. This situation reminds us that even obscure software bugs can have enormous impact in the real world."

Related Articles
Moody’s Software Bug Screws Investors
CPDOs Expose Ratings Flaw at Moody’s
http://www.stickyminds.com/MoodysBeginsInvestigation

If you come across a bug that you think can compete for the title of Bug of the Month, send it to Joey McAllister at jmcallister@sqe.com for possible inclusion in the next Between the Lines.

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You Have Been Denied Access to Shopping
So, where did you shop online during the Great Amazon Outage of 2008?

On June 6, the instant messages and emails began flying, each one asking essentially the same question: "Is Amazon down for you?" It turned out that Amazon.com was, in fact, down for everyone. And while not every visitor needed to buy something from Amazon that day, the site must've experienced a flood of visitors who wanted to see if the online retail behemoth could, in fact, be out of commission.

They met with messages ranging from "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" to "You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you have violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines, or policies of our site in the past." It was possible, during the outage, to access the Amazon homepage by secure page (https), but links on that page would take the visitor outside the secure page and, therefore, back to an error page.

According to an early report on Reuters.com, the outage lasted from about 10:25 a.m. until about 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time. The Register reported that "Friday's outage coincided with a sustained attack on the Internet Movie Database, a popular site owned by Amazon that uses Amazon IP addresses."

And then, on Monday, Amazon.com went down again, this time taking down Amazon's UK site as well, according to a post on CNET's news blog.

Amazon's S3 service, which offers hosting for individuals and businesses, did not go down during either of this month's outages, though it experienced an outage of its own in February.

A post on Wired's Epicenter blog estimates that the outage affected Amazon's earnings "at a potential cost of $31,000 per minute."

Were you affected by Amazon's outage? Check out the Survey Says! section below.

Related Articles
Amazon.com Site Fails for 2 Hours, Cause Unknown
Bots to Blame for Amazon.com Outages?
Another Amazon Outage, This Time Hitting U.K, Too
Amazon Back Up After Outage

Mars Lander Finds Possible Ice, Definite Bug
The big news from NASA this month has been a series of photos that seem to show ice being uncovered by the Phoenix lander and then melting over a period of days.

But along with that discovery came another one: a software bug that caused the lander to send one piece of data 45,000 times and then power down for the night. Because of the early shutdown, NASA reportedly lost a day's worth of work on the $420 million project.

According to an Associated Press article on Discovery News, "The lander beamed back pictures of the trench, but an overload of data prevented it from saving images of the landscape and atmosphere in its flash memory."

Perhaps it got a little too excited about its potential find.

As reported by BBC News, this was another in a line of problems experienced by the lander since it fist reached Mars. "The first glitch occurred two days after it touched down, when another satellite, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, turned off its radio."

None of the data lost was of a high-priority nature, NASA has stated, and the search for water on the red planet continues.

Related Articles
Mars Lander Glitch Leads to Lost Photos
Glitch Delays Mars Lander's Dig
Phoenix Mars Mission home page

Media Spotlight

Gray Matters Podcast: Linda Rising
In this episode of Gray Matters, Joey McAllister chats with Linda Rising at the 2008 Better Software Conference & EXPO about deception. Do we deceive ourselves and others about estimation? Do we have a choice? http://www.stickyminds.com/podcasts#GM0608.

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Were you affected by the Amazon.com outage this month?

• No, I didn't even know about it.
• I knew about it, but it didn't affect me.
• Yes, but not because I couldn't shop.
• Yes, the site thought I was a robot and I couldn't buy my stuff online!

52% said, "They're a major problem for SaaS and negatively affect the validity of SaaS as a replacement for traditional software."
47% said, "They're a big problem, but SaaS is the future anyway."