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ISP Dynamic IP Address Switch Knocks Dollar Tree Store Off The Network For Two Days

Written by Fred J. Aun
December 16th, 2009
A mistake by an Internet service provider recently disconnected a South Carolina store within the $4.6 billion, 3,803-store Dollar Tree chain from its corporate network for two days, an unusually long duration for such an outage. Making matters even worse, some store employees interpreted the outage as a cyberattack and shared that with both customers and the media.

The chain, which has stores in 48 states in the U.S., lost its data connectivity on December 10 when the service provider made a modification that went awry. "It was an inadvertent switch to dynamic IP from fixed IP," said CIO Ray Hamilton. "That shouldn’t happen, and it took us a couple of days to resolve."

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Posted in In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry, Mobile/Wireless/Contactless, Payment Systems, Premium Content, Security/Fraud, Supply Chain
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