Metro

NYC wireless network down due to Y2K-like software bug

City Hall’ s tech czar ignored a federal warning about a looming, Y2K-like software bug last year — allowing a crash of the city’s official wireless network that has been down since the weekend, sources told The Post.

As a result, transit officials can’t remotely control the Big Apple’s 12,000-plus traffic lights, and many of the city’s traffic cameras and NYPD license-plate readers are down, sources said.

“This is a big screw-up, even for the de Blasio administration,” said a source familiar with the matter.

The New York City Wireless Network, known as “NYCWiN,” crashed on Saturday, affecting the operations of city agencies that rely on it to transmit high-speed voice, video and data communications.

Workers have been scrambling around the clock to fix the entirely preventable problem, but the network remained down Wednesday — five days into the outage.

NYCWiN is overseen by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, whose commissioner, Samir Saini, was appointed by Mayor de Blasio in January 2018.

DoITT pays the Northrop Grumman Corp. about $40 million a year to run the network, which cost $500 million to build and went into service citywide in 2009.

It was unclear when it would be back up and running. But what is reasonably certain is that the technology snafu could have been prevented.

Exactly one year ago Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that GPS-enabled devices could be affected by a time counter “rollover event” set to occur this past Saturday.

DHS noted that testing showed some devices could not “correctly handle” the rollover and urged “federal, state, local, and private sector organizations” to take preventive measures.

Even if officials somehow missed that memo, The Post and other news outlets last month published a report in which one cybersecurity expert warned of potential problems and said, “I’m not going to be flying on April 6.”

Samir Saini
Samir SainiTwitter

Sources said the biggest impact has been on the Department of Transportation, which lost its digital connection to the traffic lights at intersections across the city — leaving officials unable to know if a signal stops working unless someone reports it.

In addition, the clocks that time the lights are subject to going out of sync, which could wreck the carefully timed patterns that keep traffic flowing, sources said.

“I don’t know how the city could become more congested, but that would be a concern,” one law enforcement source said.

Scores of DOT traffic cameras have also been rendered inoperable, with their video feeds replaced online with a message that falsely says, “This camera is being serviced.”

Among the cameras that aren’t working is one directly behind City Hall, according to the DOT Web site.

About 40 of NYPD’s license-plate readers have also been knocked out of service, sources said. The department says it has “hundreds” of readers.

As a stopgap measure, cops have been sent to those spots with vehicle-mounted readers that don’t rely on the broken network.

The DoITT Web site says that the FDNY also uses NYCWiN so EMTs and paramedics can send electronic “Patient Care Reports” to hospitals where patients are being brought for treatment.

But an FDNY spokesman said the department stopped using NYCWiN to transmit those reports several years ago in favor of Verizon’s wireless network.

In a statement, DoITT said: “Elements of our private wireless network have been disrupted by a worldwide GPS system update.”

“We’re working overtime to update the network and bring all of it back online. No critical public safety systems are affected by this brief software installation period, and we’ve taken several steps to make up for the disruption to the few isolated tools affected,” spokeswoman Stephanie Raphael said.

Northrop Grumman declined to comment.

The NYPD said it “always maintains contingency plans to prevent any single point of failure, and since the outage occurred over the weekend, the NYPD has deployed mobile [license plate] readers to targeted locations across the city to ensure continued service to the public.”

Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy