I always enjoy reading PPRuNe and though I am a mere PPL I always get a chuckle out of some of the posts by people who obviously have no understanding of how things work but feel the need to post anyway. And now we have a thread about my great love aviation and my lifetime career subject of software development - boy have I had some laughs.
I don't know anything about NATS software or the specific incident but I have worked with big computer systems for 40 years. Of course they'll go wrong - it is absolutely impossible to test for all scenarios and have every single combination of events covered so there is never an outage. A well written system will handle these occurrences with the minimum impact to anyone or anything around them.
It appears NATS had a 45 minute outage, during which time no plane plummeted onto a school/hospital (delete as appropriate). I would say this is a success. The fact that so many people were late for their holidays is not related to this in any real sense - it is, as many people have posted, related to the fact that there is no capacity to absorb the inevitable delays as a result of this outage. Could be a software error, could be a MAYDAY, could be an ash cloud.
I don't know anything about the head of NATS either, but hauling him in front of MPs to explain a 45 minute software outage is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard for a long time. If London had been littered with the carcasses of 747s then maybe he would have something to explain.
Too many people these days install Windows on a laptop and think they know as much about software development as professional programmers - they don't.
