DailyPost 2977
IT FAILURE – FLIGHTS IN CHAOS!
The July 2024 Microsoft Outage is still fresh and is a grim reminder as to how much our normal life can be thrown out of gear, courtesy what we in broad terms call IT failure. In the July incident a faulty software update from CrowdStrike impacted millions of Windows devices, causing widespread disruptions. This was not the first time nor the last time it has happened. Can redundancy be built up or / and create resilience at least for skeletal services in crisis. Before all this happens, vendor dependency will keep our operations on its toes. Now it’s British Airways within five months of the great Microsoft Outage.
Flights landed in chaos after another IT failure hit British Airways. The core issue was that the communication between pilots and the airlines operations centre got snapped. The consequence was that the passengers got stranded, tens and thousands of passengers encountered long delays and possible missed connections. As per the current reports the problems started shortly after 5pm GMT when it was seen that some outbound British Airways flights from Heathrow were delayed by up to two hours. These were mainly European flights.
Later domestic flights were also found to be running an hour or more late. Given the pathetic situation they were in, one passenger was literally begging on social media for an update on the outage. Between 5.45 pm and 8.45 pm only one of the dozens of scheduled British Airways departures from Heathrow was on time. Given the air traffic in Heathrow, any disruptions can swiftly lead to cancellations. BA said “we’ve apologised to customers for delays to their flights and ensured they were able to reach their destinations as planned.” British Airways has suffered notable outages in Nov 2023, May 2023 and May 2017 in recent times.
The exact reasons for this IT failure remains unknown, at least in the public domain. Nothing has been officially communicated by the concerned airlines. The airline has acknowledged a ‘technical issue’ that affected their operational systems. Given the BA’s track record, the IT failures generally happens because of a combination of factors. The factors come down to; outdated infrastructure, complex systems, most critical being human error and last but not the least cyber security. What havoc cyber security has been playing on everything is not hidden from anyone.
THE CHALLENGES TO USHERING IN A SEAMLESS AND SECURE IT SERVICES HAS TO BE FACED SQUARELY.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.