U.S. media outlets report computer outages (report from Reuters)

[Up2Late]

(Humm, and why is Fox "news" NOT effected? Humm?)

U.S. media outlets report computer outages

Tue Aug 16, 2005 08:23 PM ET

SEATTLE (Reuters) - An unidentified software virus was being blamed for computer system outages on Tuesday at ABC News, CNN and The New York Times, as computer security companies tried to pin down the cause of the disruption. CNN, breaking into regular programming, reported on air that personal computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system at the cable news network were affected by a worm that caused them to restart repeatedly.

Over the last week, Microsoft and security companies warned of a new worm, called "Zotob," that could allow an attacker to access PCs by exploiting a recently discovered flaw in Windows 2000. But security software company McAfee Inc. and Microsoft said that they did not see any heightened activity from Zotob or any indication that the worm caused outages at U.S. media outlets on Tuesday.

The New York Times said it had faced internal systems computer outages earlier in the day on Tuesday. "We just don't have a lot of details," said Catherine Mathis, spokeswoman for the New York Times Co. "It was earlier today. We're fully operational and we don't expect (the outage) to affect the production of the paper."

Officials at ABC News also reported system outages. "We haven't seen any huge uptick or impact today," said a spokeswoman with Microsoft's security unit, "a fairly small number of customers are being impacted."

<http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=9393219&src=rss/topNews>
(more at link above)