Steffi Roderick was at the dining commons, finishing her breakfast, when her phone rang. Unusual, since most people would text first at this hour, to make sure she was available to talk.
She pulled out the phone, saw the name of the head of the helpdesk department. If. Bob were calling, something serious was going on. Better go ahead and answer.
Bob Quires was a man of phlegmatic temperament, and she’d chosen him for this job because very few things could rattle him. However, today his voice had an under tone of alarm under the surface appearance of calm. “Steffi, we’ve got a problem down here. The phones are ringing off the hook, and my people are working like a bunch of one-legged men at an ass-kicking contest.”
The expression telephones ringing off the hook had always amused Steffi. In theory it could actually happen with analog telephony, particularly if a few unusual malfunctions were to occur. But with modern digital telephony it would be logically impossible for a ringtone to be initiated during an active call instead of the interrupting call going to voicemail.
But there was no time to reminisce about how curiosity about an expression had begun her journey into electrical engineering. Right now she had a problem to solve. “What are we looking at?”
“Right now it seems to be a dog’s breakfast of problems. People getting cut off in the middle of early-morning teleconferences. Researchers unable to access datasets they need. Websites suddenly becoming unavailable or unreliable, especially financial ones.”
“That’s not sounding good. I’ll be down as soon as I can. In the meantime, get the traffic analysts on the job. I’m thinking there’s got to be a pattern in there somewhere.”
The conversation finished, Steffi finished the last few bites of her meal. Even after that desperate first year of the Expulsions had become just a memory, wasting food was something one simply did not do. As soon as she’d cleaned her plate, she scanned herself back out so the bots could take away the dishes and make her place ready for the next person to sit down at it.
As she walked down to the IT offices, she did some tests of her own. Although she wouldn’t be able to access the sophisticated diagnostic software until she was at her work computer, there were some basic things she could do from her phone, like checking various websites.
It didn’t take long to notice a pattern. Anything on the local servers was no problem to access. Servers elsewhere on the Moon were hit and miss, while anything on Earth got her nothing but the spinning circle.
She could think of several kinds of accidents that would produce this sort of situation. However, it was also possible that someone was deliberately trying to cut off Shepardsport’s ability to communicate with Earth. Ever since they started up the radio station and telling the truth behind the Flannigan Administration’s lies, they’d been dealing with intermittent DDOS attacks.
Although this didn’t look like a typical DDOS attack, there was no way to be sure until she could get to her diagnostic software, which didn’t run on a phone OS. But in the meantime she’d better let Betty Margrave know, just to be on the safe side.