Sunday, January 29, 2017

Something's going on with all of these "systems failures" at airlines.

Since I am not a strong believer in coincidence, I find it very coincidental that several major airline carriers have had to ground their fleets due to supposed technology hiccups in the past several months including the most recent one that just happened with Delta.  Just last week United had to ground its flights due to a supposed computer failure.  The recent article reports, "Last year, a rash of computer failures disrupted flight operations at U.S. airlines. Thousands of passengers were stranded as carriers struggled to keep older information systems working. Delta took a $100 million hit to sales after a power-control module at the company’s Atlanta command center caught fire in August, cutting power to computers. Southwest Airlines Co. had to halt flights the month before that because of issues with “multiple technology systems.”".


I don't claim to know WTF is really going on here but I do know that large operations like major airlines do not rely on single point of failure computer systems.  They are built from the ground up for fault tolerance, redundancy and resiliency at every level: power, processing and storage.  They even have entire back up control sites so that in case one major computing Network Operations Center (NOC) is hit with catastrophe to include natural disaster like tornado, meteor strike, etc. OR terrorist activity like a major bomb detonation, another one can pick up operations nearly seamlessly.  So when I read that every major carrier is suffering from "computer problems" it begins to sound like a childishly simple explanation for something that I know cannot be that childishly simple.


My first guess would be hackers probing the security systems of the infrastructure...

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