A mysterious computer crash pushes a thriving manufacturing company to the brink of collapse,

jeopardizing the jobs of dozens of employees.

There is no apparent cause, no obvious clues.

Forensic investigators had to find out whether the disaster was caused by a computer defect, human error, or sabotage.

Today there are over 700 million computers at work in the world.

Any one of those holds millions of records vital to people, governments, and industries.

But millions of pieces of information in one small box can make that information vulnerable.

Omega engineering manufactured high-tech measurement devices for the United States Navy, NASA, and clients around the world. A state-of-the-art computer

system at their New Jersey plant enabled Omega to quickly customize their products to suit their customers' needs.

The business was growing, and revenues were up. Then came July 31st, 1996. It was a bad day at Omega

on July 31st of 96. One of the workers got in about 8.8.30 in the morning, went to his or her

workstation like they always did, and they flipped on the system. They booted up the computer.

And instead of coming on, though, it said, fixing. And the worker didn't know what was going on,

but fixing sounded pretty positive. so he let it run.

And within seconds, the machine was down.

But it wasn't that one machine that was in trouble.

The manufacturing equipment at Omega got its instructions from the computer server,

the brains of a sophisticated system that could

store over 1,000 different programs.

Those 1,000 programs built 25,000 different products, and they could customize those

products into 500,000 different pieces. So you're talking about everything that the company can make.

But now, in the span of just a few seconds, Omega's vital computer system had crashed.

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