'System outage' grounds Delta flights

[Dimitri Cherchenko]

Delta airlines says all flights suspended "due to system outage nationwide"

'System outage' grounds Delta flights - BBC News

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[Porky Speedpig]

Must be a nightmare for all concerned and affected - any word as to the root cause?

[bafanguy]

This:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/delta-...111236208.html

[log0008]

8am and the world's busiest airport is very quiet! Not a good week for those traveling though major airports

[Porky Speedpig]

Wow, that's one heck of a power outage. No doubt 2-3 back up power systems too so it will be interesting to see why one couldn't kick in.

[crablab]

Surely in the age of the cloud they should have multiple data centres?!

[Alanwsg]

Power cut crashes Delta's worldwide flight update systems ? The Register

[OldLurker]

From experience elsewhere (not being able to see behind the curtain at Delta) I'd hazard a guess that their IT guys have been beating on the management for years to get proper hot fall-back for what is nowadays a mission-critical system, but management (supported by bean-counters) have been stalling on the necessary investment.

OTOH, they may have all the fall-back in the world but they've never actually exercised it properly, so when it's called on for real, it doesn't work ...

[Lonewolf_50]

Originally Posted by OldLurker

OTOH, they may have all the fall-back in the world but they've never actually exercised it properly, so when it's called on for real, it doesn't work ...

I wonder. A whole lot of folks ran "business continuity plans" and tests before the dreaded "Y2K" event (which wasn't all that it threatened to be) so perhaps management consider that event the IT guys "crying wolf."

So now they lost a bit of this week's flock/wool ...

[Porky Speedpig]

A veritable squadron of off schedule Delta birds on the Atlantic now most heading for JFK and ATL and arriving in quick succession. Likely to be a nightmare at CBP.

[Derfred]

the dreaded "Y2K" event (which wasn't all that it threatened to be)

Y2J wasn't all that it threatened to be because they identified it beforehand and fixed it (at huge cost in some areas). You obviously missed that bit.

[PAXboy]

Correct Derfred. Y2K was fixed in time but it suits everyone to say we cryed wolf. Then it is easier to not give credit where it's due.

Correct OldLurker. I was in IT for 27 years and because it works 99.9% of the time, they think it will be acceptable when it fails. As they say in the airline industry, "If you think preventative maintenance is expensive - try a crash for size" For years I saw IT starved of investment and then, when it did go wrong, they gave us the money we'd been asking for.

[esa-aardvark]

Y2K, I made a lot of money out of this. I invested a smallish amount into a company
working on Y2K solutions. Then I forgot about it for a couple of years, investment
had improved in value by about 8 times. On the subject of power supplies the last Data
Centre which I managed had 2*Ships diesels, each capable of carrying the mainframe &
ancilliary equipment load. I wonder in the case of Delta if it was some equipment other
than the computers which failed. I remember in NZ a few years ago the highly robust
point of sale network went down when someone found and cut the only "single point failure" cable.

[c52]

My near-invariable experience in IT was that there would be a total failure when the annual test of the uninterruptible power supply took place.

[Ian W]

I wonder how long it will be for Delta to have a redundant system set up say at MSP? If they had done that the failure could have been transparent to the airline apart from the people directly involved at ATL. It seems that all the airline beancounters would prefer to upset their customers and give dispatch a really hard problem to solve at vast expense to the airline (just think of the EU mandated payments!) rather than have an efficient system that is fault tolerant. Perhaps, if IT had asked for the back up and it been refused the costs of the global ground stop and recovery could be put on the accountancy head count budget? That might concentrate their minds.

[Smott999]

What's interesting is Georgia Power is denying that there was an outage at all. None of their customers had a loss and all their equipment was running.
Delta called them to have them look at a master switch of some sort which had failed. Hmm.

What is that called.....single point of, something.....what is it again?

If it is something that silly and bad, heads will roll.

[vector4fun]

We had a lightning induced power failure years ago. Also had a bank of batteries and diesel generators to take over that failed to work. Seems the folks that maintained the UPS system monthly failed to disconnect the dummy load used for testing.....

[Smott999]

I used to work at an intl bank, and every 6-9 months we had to do a full DIsaster recovery drill. Took it very seriously. If these guys had their whole global network sitting on one switch....yikes.

[Lonewolf_50]

Originally Posted by Derfred

Y2J wasn't all that it threatened to be because they identified it beforehand and fixed it (at huge cost in some areas). You obviously missed that bit.

No, I didn't miss anything as I was involved in three different BCP's for Y2K. Thanks for playing. I just didn't add all of the bloody detail to that post, so perhaps I overdid the brevity.


My point is that some in current management, who probably weren't in management then, may perceive through MBA eyes that Y2K was "crying wolf" since they didn't know what it took to mitigate it. As you are probably aware, management "up and out" and medium to high turnover is common.

[Joe_K]

Ars Technica has this:

"According to the flight captain of JFK-SLC this morning, a routine scheduled switch to the backup generator this morning at 2:30am caused a fire that destroyed both the backup and the primary. "

If true: oops.

Data center disaster disrupts Delta Air Lines | Ars Technica