A glitch that shut down the U.S. Postal Service's package tracking system last week has been fixed, and the system is back online, according to an agency spokeswoman.

That means customers and businesses are once again able to get real-time information about their packages.

Postal Service spokesman Sue Brennan said the system was brought back up yesterday at 5 a.m., a week after it crashed. The Postal Service had said the system would be back online by Sunday.

Brennan said once the system was up and running, it didn't have any problem accepting the 23.6 million backlogged transactions that occurred during the shutdown.

The problem was caused by 11 data corruption errors in an IBM database system housed in San Mateo, Calif., Brennan said.

The system first went down on Monday, April 15, she said. It was brought back up the next day after one data corruption error was found and fixed. However, she said, the system immediately crashed again.

Brennan said the crash also affected the Postal Service's internal tracking system. But, she said, during the week-long system shut down, no mail was delayed or lost.

Sun Journal

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2002