Twenty years from now... uber car service system failure affecting 90% of North America
The only reason this will never happen is because there's a only snowball's chance in hell that Uber will still be around in 20 years.
Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
71–80 of 107 posts
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Sure, the skies are more and more crowded, meaning more and more people will be affected by a once-in-20 year failure, but why would it happen more and more common?
Well the archaic systems are getting older and older. From what I've heard it's almost impossible to get replacement parts for some of the computer systems that run airports/airlines.
Has not been my experience. 2 decades in the airline space. It's mostly uninformed people assuming that TPF is the issue or that it runs on old hardware. Neither is true.
In this case, for example, it wasn't the airline. It was Eurocontrol (https://www.eurocontrol.int)
Airline tech outages are just more visible than outages in other industries. Like manufacturing, etc. It doesn't make the news when all your manufacturing plants halt for 6 hours due to tech issues. Airlines could improve, sure, but pundit observations are usually off base. They are also dependent on systems they don't control, like ATC, TSA, Airport owned kiosks, and so on.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be fascinating to read about what bug took down a system with one outage in 20 years. I remember reading in the chubby paper (from google) that user error was the cause of more than half the downtime incidents. Wonder if that's the case here too.
Yeah, I recall last year "BA’s £150,000,000 outage was caused by someone turning computers on and off too quickly" I think companies often try to stay quite about the dumb stuff.
Well - I wouldn't call it dumb stuff. After all, it's only a matter of time one of us does something truly stupid :-) Even more so when under stress and pressure when shit hits the fan, which is usually when human operators have to intervene. It's part of building reliable systems to reduce the chances of operator error. See: the Hawaii missile alert bug! It must be truly terrifying to sit at that particular keyboard typing in any command.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#74Yes, this sucked. I just had a 1 hour delay on a 1 hour flight (AMS-ZHR). Unfortunately, no compensation until its a 2 hour delay (but thank god it was only one hour!). Passengers who had a layover were noticeably less happy.
You'd probably won't have been eligable for compensation since this delay was definitely beyond the airline's control.
While a lot of airlines try to weasel out of their obligations (mechanical failue, for example, which however is the airline's responsibility) I would think such a case is pretty clear cut.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#75I was on a plane just about to push back at Heathrow, and the pilot informed us we'd be delayed 15 minutes due to this failure. In the end it was 10 minutes, and we landed only 5 minutes late at my destination. Doesn't appear to have been a big deal, at least for me.
I wonder if that is due to Heathrow using Time-Based Separation software. https://www.airport-technology.com/news/optimised-runway-too...
Technically, Time Based Separation helps only arrivals since it tries to negate the effects of headwinds on final approach, but it does add a lot of resilience to the airport to absorb delays that would normally ripple to departures.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#76Apparently the Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System (ETFMS) packed up. >“ETFMS facilitates improvements in flight management from the pre-planning stage to the arrival of the flight. It maximises the updating of flight-related data and thus improves the real picture of a given flight, thereby contributing to the Gate-to-Gate Concept,” Eurocontrol explains on its website. >The agency initially reported that contin…
It would be fascinating to read about what bug took down a system with one outage in 20 years. I remember reading in the chubby paper (from google) that user error was the cause of more than half the downtime incidents. Wonder if that's the case here too.
If I remember correctly, a similar outage in the UK was due to increased flight volumes. The system had a hardcoded limit somewhere which caused issues as flight volume increased. The software was old enough that they weren't aware of that issue beforehand.
I could imagine something similar happening here.
It definitely shows how well software can work with the right practices. Only one outage in 20 years and that one only caused a reduction of 10% in capacity. Don't think many companies can match that.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#77For those curious, Eurocontrol MUAC (Maastricht Upper Area Control Center) migrated to 50 virtual SUSE Linux Enterprise servers running under IBM z/VM hypervisor on a IBM z196 mainframe system in 2013.
Does any of this effect the nature of the failure? Have they said what went wrong?
No but the fact that this is the first outage in 20 years could indicate that mainframes still have their place if you need 100% reliability.
Which makes plans of banks to move core systems from mainframes to the cloud even more worrying.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they'd use Docker with React this would have never happened! It's probably because they wrote it in Go. Did you know Go doesn't even have generics?
What do you mean? Go has generics. Kind of. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...
Wow, that's the best/worst thing I've read in a long time. Imagine you'd have to maintain code using those without knowing it..
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#79I was on a plane just about to push back at Heathrow, and the pilot informed us we'd be delayed 15 minutes due to this failure. In the end it was 10 minutes, and we landed only 5 minutes late at my destination. Doesn't appear to have been a big deal, at least for me.
10% reduction probably meant that they tried to keep most flights on time and "strategically" delayed some flights. Makes it worse for some passengers but keeps knock-on effects for transfer passengers under control.
Re: Half of European flights delayed due to system failure
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Sure, the skies are more and more crowded, meaning more and more people will be affected by a once-in-20 year failure, but why would it happen more and more common?
Well the archaic systems are getting older and older. From what I've heard it's almost impossible to get replacement parts for some of the computer systems that run airports/airlines.
That's more a problem with core banking software (and the hardware it runs on) than with airline software.