As many are probably already aware earlier last week, Delta had a power outage in their Atlanta headquarters. The outage caused their computer systems to go down worldwide resulting in delaying or canceling hundreds of flights.
So even though the airports they are operating out of across the country or even in London were fully operational and ready to go with power and staff. With the computer systems being down and holding people's ticket information it grounded them as they were without the needed information to issue boarding passes.
As a technical person myself and a programmer recently learning about MongoDB. I am surprised they didn't have a working high availability setup for their database, etc. being that they are a multi-billion dollar fortune 500 company. Using something like MongoDB or similar with an HA setup in multiple data centers. They would probably even be better off using Blockchain technology.
Even a bootstrapped startup could get a high availability database cluster or something similar going in multiple datacenters. Plus hours of downtime would be serious money for any sizable or growing company. Other than monetary loss, any organization being down for a significant amount of time would cause reputational damage for such an outage.
I just find it insane this even happened considering their status of a multi-billion dollar company. I'd just think in their line of business they'd invest into better technical infrastructure. I just find it super strange big enterprises have problems like these.
If the average airline ticket price is $370, maybe 10 or 20 full sold out planes would be enough to pay a handful of really talented people to build better systems.
Some are even suggesting the possibility that they got hacked. If that is true then calling it a power outage instead of admitting it is an insult to our intelligence.
While it could be a possibility that Delta got hacked since it has been over a week now I doubt it. I'm pretty sure if somthing like that happened their attorneys would make them disclose that by now.
Delta is offering compensation vouchers to customers significantly affected by the outage and their CEO put out a video on their Twitter saying "This isn't who we are." It sounds like they did have backup power, but it didn't kick over. At this point, I think the best route would be for them to go with a distributed system in multiple data centers with automatic failover and manual override.
The people I feel sorry for the most are the passengers and the staff on the ground not in corporate headquarters. Imagine being a minimum wage customer service worker out in the field being around a large crowd of angry customers yelling at you, even if it's out of your control. Those people on the ground don't make any technical decisions for their computer systems as far as I'm aware - that would be the people up in corporate.
I think it'd be cool if they would post a post-mortem about the outage like some major tech companies do when they suffer outages such as Github, Dropbox, Cloudflare, Stack Exchange and many more tech companies have done.
As far as I can tell Delta does not have an engineering blog like Uber, Facebook, and many others. So as an outsider, my opinion would be that a social networking site with cat photos and a car sharing service is more engineered than an airline.
Even in The Social Network movie, Mark Zuckerberg played by actor Jesse Eisenberg talks about how if Facebook were down for even a day, there would be a domino effect of losing users.
Now to give Delta credit, Southwest also had issues a month ago. It reportedly took 12 hours just to reboot Southwest computer systems and after all that time waiting once it was back online the problems continued. So I think the lesson here to learn for the Airlines are to start acting more like tech startups.
Even be more open and transparent like them, help each other. Plus one of the big benefits of having an engineering blog is if they post something exciting that draws the attention of developers they can use it to promote getting a career with them.
I think a lot of developers want to work on fun, exciting problems and working on the technology behind the scenes for planes, power plants, trains, cars, etc isn't as sexy as the next Facebook or Snapchat.
Even General Electric are running multiple advertisements on television and online trying to recruit developers. So I think if airlines started acting more like tech startups they would bring up their coolness factor and recruit a lot of fresh talent that way.
Even maybe news outlets are reporting, outages like these will happen again. Fortune is reporting the industry is long overdue for upgrading their tech, which I agree is true from my outside knowledge and reading.
What are your thoughts on this incident? What would you do to improve if you were the CEO of an airline?
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Image Credit: https://pixabay.com/en/airport-tourism-fly-air-traffic-1515431/
