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Database Glitch Grounds American/US Airways

Posted by timothy on from the abort-retry-fail-land dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to numerous news sources, all American Airlines and US Airways flights were grounded for two or three hours this morning. Both problems were caused by a computer glitch in the systems hosted by EDS. Quote: The operating system that drives the airline's flight plans went down."

4 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. EDS? Quelle surprise. by leathered · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sorry, have to rant where I see EDS mentioned.

    EDS, in cahoots with the UK govenment, have wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money on failed IT projects. Notable ones include the Inland Revenue (UK IRS), Child Support Agency (£50M over budget and still not working) and an email and directory service for the NHS (withdrew at last minute allowing C&W to steal at a much inflated price).

    Though the blame cannot completely be laid at the door of EDS, the government has been guilty of sloppy auditing and the worst being the willingness to hand over extra money when EDS has come around with the begging bowl.

    --
    For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
  2. Do you know the cost of redundency ? by aepervius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here around we studied it, for one major airline in EU. We wanted a "backup system" in case the main system went down. Total Cost, without maintenance, about *3 whole day* of traffic "benefits"... Yes, that much. Right now the project is still discussed but most of us thinks it is dead in the egg. Instead the "older" and "less powerfull" developpement system will be used in case of break down.

    Redundancy is OK, as long as it is not bleeding you dry.

    --
    C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
    visit randi.org
  3. Probably Sabre Holdings, rest probably wrong by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 5, Interesting
    First, they didn't "complete a migration". They're still deep in the middle of it, and will be for years to come.

    Second, this failure isn't in the Sabre reservations system, it's in some ancillary product, so who knows? Maybe they have no intention of switching it to Unix.

    Third, he didn't say so, but the migration isn't just to Unix. It's also migration to MySQL! (Hahahahahahahaha. Then again, coming from TPF, coded in assembly language for 4Kword pages, and a hierarchical database, that might seem pretty advanced.) Sabre had to fund a MySQL port to 64 bits, and a new "stored procedures" feature.

  4. Re:Wild speculation by Archibald+Buttle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Blaming MS is the easy way out.

    I just read all the stories that were linked to this article.

    None of them blamed Microsoft. In fact the only blame pushed in their direction was your comment...

    The articles did say that there was a problem with the operating system. Now we don't know who exactly said this, or what they said precisely, so it is quite possible that this isn't entirely accurate reporting.

    I find it very difficult to believe that they would have any single points of failure in a system of that importance.

    I agree it's unlikely, but it is possible that there is a single point of failure in their system. There are a great deal of shoddily engineered systems in use today.