Southwest Airlines canceled more than 550 flights on Tuesday after experiencing unspecified system issues that affected its operations across the country. The incident follows a Monday-night data outage linked back to a third-party weather provider that delayed over 1,450 of the airline’s flights. Southwest is investigating both issues, but does not currently believe they are linked.
“We are in the process of resuming normal operations after a system issue this afternoon that created flight disruptions throughout our network,” Southwest said on Tuesday. “We know many Customers still require assistance and are working to address those concerns as quickly as possible.”
Citing a “reservation computer issue,” the FAA issued a temporary nationwide ground stop for Southwest at the request of the airline on Tuesday afternoon. The ground stop was lifted after about an hour. In addition to the cancellations, approximately 1,800 Southwest flights were delayed on Tuesday with an additional 315 canceled and 620 delayed as of Wednesday morning.
A big question in life is how much effort to put into preparing for failure of a service.
SWA has a big problem of its contracted weather service letting it down, plus apparently a problem with its reservations system the same weak..
Northwurst lost its reservations center for many hours because a contractor sliced through two key cables, which were unwisely buried near each other.
Airlines and other people were impacted by a large bomb beside an AT&T communications building in downtown Nashville.
Etc
With hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, …. being a risk to computer facilities.
At Pacific Western Airlines before I bailed out we were starting to plan for full backup as maintenance increasingly depended on real-time data recording.
We had the advantage of communications tie-lines already established between Vancouver BC and Calgary AB, to build on. A data centre in each city would have ability to perform all functions, rather than expanding the existing one in the Vancouver BC area. Each area has different primary hazards.
(And of course today malware is a major threat, recall a key pipeline out of service for days because of ransomware.
Vote for more policing, perps are being caught, with effort:
– https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/two-men-convicted-of-helping-create-ransomware-attacks/
– https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/ukraine-police-seize-cash-in-raids-on-major-ransomware-gang/
And in harassment cases, such as the bleep who motivated a Coquitlam BC teenager to take her own life – he has been extradited from Holland to stand trial in Canada.
And in a wild case, authorities in Australia, Canada, and the US organized a huge sting of people strongly suspected of being involved in criminal activities. With key help from an arrested individual who flipped to help police they set up and publicized a fake high-security cellular telephone service that copied text messages to authorities. Whee!
But Amacrick works against policing, on the scam that police are biased (criminals aren’t of course, they just attack vulnerable people :-o). https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/18/business/economy-stock-market-news/google-has-another-moonshot-project-going-carbon-free-by-2030