UA to IT Dept: You're SO fired

[Champcar]

Computer glitch halts United flights

1 hour, 4 minutes ago

A United Airlines computer malfunction halted all departures systemwide for two hours Wednesday, the carrier said.
United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said the airline did not yet know what caused the outage between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. CDT, when departures were able to resume.
"We were experiencing a computer outage and now our computers are back up," she said. "Right now we're working hard to resume our operations."
FAA spokesman Allen Kenitzer in Seattle confirmed that all United flights across its system had been grounded because of the computer problem.
At O'Hare International Airport, United's inbound and outbound flights were delayed between one and two hours, and no other airlines were affected, airport spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said.
Michael McCarron, director of community affairs for the San Francisco International Airport, said about a dozen United flights had been affected at the airport Wednesday morning and most delays averaged 20 to 30 minutes. Chicago-based United is the airport's largest carrier.
"I expect it to decrease as the day goes on," he said. "And by noon, (it will) be pretty much back on track."

Way to go IT.

[bike21]

Bummer. Reminds when SKYW headquarters got struck by lightning and crashed the whole network. We didn't go anywhere for about 4 hours!

Technoloy blows when it doesn't work

[BobDDuck]

Originally Posted by bike21

Reminds when SKYW headquarters got struck by lightning and crashed the whole network. We didn't go anywhere for about 4 hours!

That happened to us too last year. We had some captains who called Flight Service and just filed from old flight plans as long as the weather was good. We went from PHL to CAK doing that. I really wanted to file us as JIA1 but we kept the original flight number in the system.

[killbilly]

I'm kidding, although I wouldn't be surprised.

Somehow, around 8am CST, United Airlines' (or at least part of it) dispatch system crashed.

For two and a half hours.

They never told us exactly what happened, but I overheard a CSR saying that they couldn't tell which pilots were on which aircraft and there were other problems as well.

It would seem to me that one of the most crucial systems to operations would have some levels of backup and redundancy built in, but what do I know? I'm just a pax.

Anyway - DIA is the site of mass confusion - most everyone got in the air and all the connections were late, too, so you have the rest of this morning's traffic as well as the early afternoon traffic hitting at the same time.

Guess the crew got paid for the extra 2.5 hours, though, since we were sitting out on the end of the runway, not at the gate.

[Champcar]

http://forums.jetcareers.com/general...things-up.html

[killbilly]

Yeah, just saw that.

Sitting at DIA right this minute and it's nuts. Never seen so many people sprinting through a terminal in my life....

[aloft]

Originally Posted by killbilly

It would seem to me that one of the most crucial systems to operations would have some levels of backup and redundancy built in, but what do I know? I'm just a pax.

Speaking as someone with more than 12 years experience in IT, software projects are FREQUENTLY constrained by dollars and by incompetent business-types who promise the moon in half the time and for half the money the project SHOULD take (and usually in order to secure themselves a fat bonus). And so things that you would reasonably assume should be part of an application get cut due to insufficient funding, resources, or time.

And of course, the clueless, kneejerk reaction when things go wrong is to blame the IT folks, just as the thread title does. But I'll bet you a coke that the developers openly stated the potential problems due to the shortcuts ordered by management, and that this failure was entirely expected.

[mtsu_av8er]

This is clearly the fault of the passengers. If they had paid more for their tickets, the computers would work flawlessly. Now, in addition to delayed flights, we're going to have to deal with angry passengers at the airport.

The problem is - these passengers are too stupid to understand computers! They should just ride Greyhound.

Geez. . . . if only we could find a way to get rid of these stupid customers . . .

[MQAAord]

I merged the two threads about this topic.

[Sprint100]

In defense of IT, most power outages are the result of either the company supplying electricity or a circuit overloading and tripping, etc. And those eletrical circuits in the building are not the responsibility of the IT staff. Then I also have to backup (no pun intended) what Aloft said, you'd all be amazed at needed IT hardware being chopped by them upper cheeses.

[killbilly]

Originally Posted by aloft

Speaking as someone with more than 12 years experience in IT, software projects are FREQUENTLY constrained by dollars and by incompetent business-types who promise the moon in half the time and for half the money the project SHOULD take (and usually in order to secure themselves a fat bonus). And so things that you would reasonably assume should be part of an application get cut due to insufficient funding, resources, or time.

And of course, the clueless, kneejerk reaction when things go wrong is to blame the IT folks, just as the thread title does. But I'll bet you a coke that the developers openly stated the potential problems due to the shortcuts ordered by management, and that this failure was entirely expected.

Actually, Aloft, I was thinking the exact same thing you were - I've got about 15 or so years in telecom, and we've got the same mission-critical type stuff for voice that you do for data.

Hell - it's all data these days, if the products I'm working on are any indication.

It's actually not that clueless a reaction - because the IT guys WILL get blamed whether or not it's their fault - think of the thread title in a more sarcastic, Office-Spacey type way and you'll see what I mean.

I am really, really curious, though. It had to be fairly catastrophic to take everything down like that. I mean, system-WIDE. You'd think that the dispatch/ops software would be effectively modular, but I really don't know much about it and that's why I'm so curious.

Dispatch software used in public safety applications (9-1-1) is similar in function, and I know for a FACT that those are some of the most over-engineered applications on the planet, and most of them are stone-reliable. Most of them.

[aloft]

Yeah I got the sarcasm on a subsequent read. IT people are easy targets when managers go hunting for scapegoats. As for points of failure, it could be a number of things...electrical failure, fried network infrastructure, etc. Mission-critical systems tend not to fail for things that ordinary users' systems do, like bad hard disks, memory, etc due to failover/redundancy engineered into the system. But cut off access to your databases, and you're sunk...which is why I suspect network hardware issues.

And yeah, it's all data--voice is going digital more and more everywhere you go.