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This Week 'IT Issues' Ground Delta Airlines' Flights (cnbc.com)
Delta Air Lines has been forced to cancel at least 150 flights, and expects to cancel even more. But "the IT department is working to rectify the situation as soon as possible," they tweeted Sunday -- more than four hours ago. Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes CNBC:
Delta Air Lines U.S. domestic flights were grounded on Sunday evening due to automation issues, according to an advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration... "Delta teams are expeditiously working to fix a systems outage that has resulted in departure delays for flights on the ground," the airline said in the statement. "Flights in the air remain unaffected". [And their international flights were unaffected.]
Delta also grounded 2,000 flights last summer after a computer outage caused by a power outage in Atlanta. At the time Reuters reported that "Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions... because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s." And sure enough, just last week, another "IT issue" forced United Airlines to ground all their domestic flights.
Delta also grounded 2,000 flights last summer after a computer outage caused by a power outage in Atlanta. At the time Reuters reported that "Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions... because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s." And sure enough, just last week, another "IT issue" forced United Airlines to ground all their domestic flights.
For more information, the airlines are running on TPF from IBM. IBM still updates it, so it's not ancient, and it runs on beefy modern hardware. IBM claims it's extremely stable, fwiw. However, the airlines have built up a lot of systems around it, like their online booking services, for example, and they have some middleware that they seem to have written themselves to interface with TPF. The middleware and front end systems seem to have synchronization issues.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Bah.
The core system can't be "extremely stable". If all that breaks is the "online booking", then the airline wouldn't be grounded. They'd fly around with planes half-full of people who bought their tickets weeks in advance - a large part of the customer base. If the online booking breaks, you can't book online. You can still book by phoning them or showing up at their desk in the airport - where the core system is used directly. And you can still show up with your two week old tickets.
Having the web-based frontend break will sure cost them, as customers then move on to a competing airline. But it won't put all planes on the ground, unless booking stays down for a whole month. Therefore, we know the core system broke too.
Nah, not ransom ware. Delta recently outsourced it's infra to Microsoft and 3rd party contractors. We weren't even able to log into email on the intranet during all this. Security certs out of date, and everything is now on *ugh* SharePoint. Intranet used to be fast, albeit it was organized horribly. They they announced the "new" deltanet which was all SharePoint. Now it's 4 times slower, but hey, it'll look good on a tablet and has slick animations while you're dying of old age waiting for the pages to load.