Northrop to pay $250K to ID Va. outage

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman has agreed to pay as much as $250,000 to study why Virginia's state computer networks suffered a widespread outage at the end of August, and why it then took days to restore data to some state agencies, Chief Information Officer Sam Nixon told wary lawmakers during a briefing Monday morning, the Virginia Politics blog reports.

Nixon told members of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission that he was confident that the figure would cover the costs of a full soup-to-nuts study of the computer outage. An initial failure of a memory card in a data storage unit housed south of Richmond knocked some processes offline at 26 of 89 state agencies. The Department of Motor Vehicles had to turn away customers for almost a week.

Sam Abbate, a vice president of Northrop Grumman, which holds a $2.4 billion contract to run and modernize the state's computer network, told the delegates and senators that the company regrets the inconvenience to Virginians. "What should not have happened, happened," he said.

Nixon said much of the weeklong delay resulted from the complicated process of restoring and rebooting data corrupted during the initial failure. Computer experts had determined that some data has been lost -- notably 4,200 photos of customers who visited the Department of Motor Vehicles for new licenses on the afternoon of Aug. 25, when the memory card first failed. The DMV has asked those customers to return and have their photos retaken.

For more about Northrop's decision to pay $250,000 to study the cause of Virginia's computer outage, go to the Virginia Politics blog.