Delta Computer Glitches Force Flight Halts Third Year In a Row (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. airline grounded all domestic flights Tuesday to deal with a technology issue that affected some of its systems. About an hour later, Delta said it had restored all its systems, allowing the services to resume. While the carrier said there were no disruptions or safety issues with any flight, the systems failure was the third in as many years that forced Delta to shut its operations. In January last year, a 2 1/2-hour computer breakdown grounded domestic flights. Delta's worldwide computer systems failed in August 2016, causing massive cancellations. This time, international flights weren't affected, and the grounding was relatively short. Still, with limited updates on flight schedules, irate customers took to social media.

Comments

And I'm sure their CEO will get a massive raise

[Indy1]

while cutting infrastructure spending and outsourcing IT positions in a mad attempt to make his/her stock options go through the roof.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Still not surprised, but a little confused

[imidan]

I'm not surprised, although I keep thinking that the massive amounts of money Delta loses due to IT failures would be enough incentive to bring their IT infrastructure back under their control. Since 2016, Delta's CIO, Rahul Samant, has been working to move IT employees out of Delta into Indian IT consultancies (see http://www.fox9.com/news/delta...).

It seems to me that airlines basically have four things of real value: aircraft, ground crews to maintain the aircraft, flight crews to operate the aircraft, and an IT system that allows them to schedule and dispatch the aircraft. When an airline talks about its "core competencies," I feel like their IT system should definitely be one, because if it fails, the planes don't fly. That seems like enough reason to not offshore that part of the business.

Re: Still not surprised, but a little confused

[mhotchin]

Knock on effects. Oops, missed your connecting flight. Oops, flight crew is now over hours, have to get another one. Oops, flight didn't make it, so the flight out of the destination is hooped as well.

Joe vs. the Volcano

[mentil]

They neglected the annual human sacrifice to the AS/400 gods.