U.S. Spy Satellites Out For Three Days Because of Y2K Bug, Chicago TribuneReports

CHICAGO, Jan. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- The United States' image-collecting spy satellites were affected by a year 2000 computer bug for nearly three days, an outage far more substantial than the Pentagon initially reported, according to a story in the Thursday, January 13, Chicago Tribune.

While the Pentagon first portrayed the interruption as being only a few hours, knowledgeable government officials said that the entire constellation of high-accuracy and radar spy satellites was either out of service or functioning far below capacity for most of the holiday weekend.

A computer patch intended to avert Y2K glitches turned the flow of data from five spy satellites into indecipherable garble. Within a few hours, Pentagon technicians redirected the satellite signals and began the slow process of manually deciphering the garbled signals.

The three-day shutdown occurred at a time when the entire U.S. intelligence community was on global alert for potential terrorist activity relating to year 2000 celebrations.

The complete story is published in the Thursday, January 13, Chicago Tribune and on chicagotribune.com.

SOURCE Chicago Tribune

-- Edward R. (somewhere@the.morrow), January 13, 2000