Last Sunday morning, I was dealing with seasonal allergies. Nothing dramatic — just the usual springtime experience of feeling like nature has personally declared war on your sinuses.
So before heading out for the morning, I grabbed an allergy pill from the medicine cabinet.
Problem solved. Or so I thought.
A little later, I arrived at church, sat down in my usual seat – about half-way back in the middle. I chatted with some friends, sang some songs… all perfectly normal.
But then the sermon started, and I suddenly felt really tired. The kind of drowsiness where you’re fighting for your life just to keep your eyes open. In direct line of sight from the pastor. I fought hard, but there was nothing I could do. I dozed off, woke up, dozed off, got an elbow in the ribs from my wife, woke up, and then dozed off again. It was rough.
Only afterward did I realize what had happened.
I had accidentally taken a pill from the “drowsy” bottle instead of the “non-drowsy” bottle.
Same purpose. Similar packaging… but a very different outcome.
And honestly, that feels remarkably similar to a lot of telecom outages.
Many Outages Begin With Someone Trying to Help
When people imagine outages, they often picture catastrophic failures:
- hardware exploding,
- major software bugs,
- fiber cuts,
- power failures,
- or cyberattacks.
But in reality, many telecom problems begin with a well-intentioned attempt to improve something.
Someone adds a firewall rule to improve security.
Someone enables SIP ALG to “help” VoIP traffic.
Someone tightens fraud controls.
Someone adjusts routing priorities.
Someone upgrades firmware.
Someone deploys automatic failover logic.
The original problem may even get solved.
But the side effects create a new problem that is worse than the original one.
The SIP ALG Problem
SIP ALG is one of the classic examples.
The idea behind SIP ALG sounds perfectly reasonable: “The firewall will intelligently help VoIP traffic traverse NAT.” How helpful is that?!
And yet SIP ALG has probably broken more VoIP deployments than it has ever helped.
Because in practice, the “helpful” system often:
- rewrites SIP headers incorrectly,
- corrupts SDP information,
- interferes with media negotiation,
- or creates intermittent one-way audio problems that are almost impossible to troubleshoot.
The fix becomes the problem.
Side Effects Are Operational Reality
One of the hard truths of engineering is that every fix has side effects.
Sometimes the side effects are small. Sometimes they’re larger than the original issue. If you fix one type of call with a configuration change, what are the odds that you’re going to break another (perhaps more common) call type?
That’s why mature telecom engineering focuses heavily on:
- staged rollouts,
- maintenance windows,
- rollback planning,
- monitoring changes carefully,
- and limiting blast radius.
Because even good ideas can create bad outcomes.
Final Thoughts
In retrospect, my allergy medication problem was entirely avoidable. The label was right there on the bottle.
But humans are surprisingly good at seeing what they expect to see rather than what’s actually in front of them – especially during routine tasks.
Telecom engineers are no different. Many outages don’t begin with malicious intent or catastrophic failures. They begin with somebody trying to make the network better.
And sometimes the thing that causes the problem…
is the thing that was supposed to fix it.
