That's a great one.

Related are the faster-than-light stock-exchange trading orders of the past few years.

Some trades were originating out of Chicago for NY exchanges which, based on release timing of information, would have had to travel faster than light. Truth being that there's early access being offered some traders.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/3/4798542/whats-faster-than-...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.5966v1.pdf

That was great thanks!

And also introduced me to the units command which seems very handy!

There are huge disasters that come of software mistakes -- but look at the story of the Therac-25 vs. this kind of story. Factual stories don't normally have punchlines.

If however many billions of dollars were actually lost due to a server rebooting at the wrong time, would it actually be possible that it remained a secret, only documented in this one humorous and totally un-sourced account?

Also note the exaggerations of the incompetence of the IBM datacenter operators.

It's an entertaining read, because it's written to be an entertaining read ("a former gnome of Zurich"?). Maybe there's some kernel of truth in there; maybe not -- but there's no way to tell now (without other, better sources) what that may be.