The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Apache Chief

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2015-10-21

W.T.F. Community College hired a team of highly-recommended web design consultants to bring its website in to the 21st century. Paul was tasked with overseeing their work and supporting the new site upon go-live. After a couple months of grinding, they cranked out a beautiful new site that was accessible, navigable, and responsive. It also removed the old site's dependence on Flash, replacing it with a titanic mound of PHP and JavaScript that was run by Apache.

Paul and his team gave it a thorough beating in their test environment and everything seemed solid. They even gave a demo of it to the the head of W.T.F. Community College, President Skroob. He was able to easily find his way around, sign up, set his password to 1-2-3-4-5, and register for fake classes. It got the Prez's official salute of approval. The amazing new website was ready to be launched in time for the fall semester.

The first day of classes rolled around and suddenly everything didn't seem so rosy. President Skroob frantically burst in to the IT office shouting "The web site is down! The web site is down!" A quick check of the monitoring system didn't show anything wrong, and manual inspection didn't either. The server hosting the site was hardly breaking a sweat. No pressure on CPU, RAM, or I/O. Paul tried browsing to the site and the browser just hung. No errors, no nothing.