From an article in IEEE Spectrum, it looks like they had a pretty serious situation on the International Space Station this past June, but they’ve worked it out. It shut down the station’s three computers, which are crucial for space station operation.

October 2007 -Aboard the International Space Station, the three Russian computers that control the station’s orientation have been happily humming away now for several weeks. And that’s proof that the crisis in June that crippled the ISS and bloodied the U.S.-Russian partnership that supports it, has been solved.

The Russians came up with a bunch of explanations blaming NASA, and many of them proved to be wrong. Ultimately, they found that the problem was corrosion on one of the wires used to shut down the computers in the case of a power surge that couldn’t be stopped by power regulators. This single wire was a single point of failure, even though the whole system was supposed to be triply redundant.

It is dismaying that after decades of experience with manned space stations, Russian space engineers still couldn’t keep unwanted condensation at bay. But what’s worse is that they designed circuitry that would allow one spot of corrosion to fell a supposedly triply redundant control computer complex. Another cause for dismay is that when trouble did develop, the Russians’ first instinct was to blame their American partners. Such deficiencies need to be worked out in the years ahead, on the space station, before both the technology and the diplomacy can be thought reliable enough for far-ranging missions that replacement shipments wouldn’t be able to reach.

Space Station: Internal NASA Reports Explain Origins of June Computer Crisis

Interesting, don’t you think?