United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
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United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
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Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#2Very little news about this on Google News, but heard over the local Chicago ABC affiliate that the FAA attributed this to an "automation error"
Edit: And its Twitter account has been relatively inactive, with more than 30 minutes since the last reply-to or general tweet...presumably a lot complaining tweets have come in in the last 30 minutes https://twitter.com/united/with_replies
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#3Not a word about it on United's web site. Flight status page doesn't load correctly. "Today's Operations" gives an error message. United's Twitter is silent.
Meanwhile news articles and twitter complaints abound. http://mashable.com/2015/07/08/united-computer-problems-flig...
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#4Official status page: http://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/jsp/summary_sys.jsp
Currently says:
ATCSCC ADVZY 027 DCC 07/08/15 UAL GROUND STOP REVISION
DESTINATION AIRPORT: ALL AIRPORTS
FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL FACILITIES
GROUND STOP PERIOD: 08/1200Z - 08/1315Z
REASON: USER REQUEST AUTOMATION ISSUESRe: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#5Interesting bits:
"Departing DEN; taxied and then returned to gate. Pilot says nationwide failure of "three or four" computer systems. Only information from airport staff is that since the computers are down UAL can't book pax onto any other airline ..."
"Systemwide Ground Stop posted at FAA: Due to USER REQUEST DUE TO AUTOMATION ISSUES. UAL AND SUBS ONLY., departure traffic destined to ALL airport will not be allowed to depart until at or after 13:15 UTC."
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#6That's twice in a short time now - 'coincidence' on Ian Fleming's scale. A third time is enemy action. Airlines do seem like a pretty juicy target for cyber war operations - you can cause a gigantic amount of disruption with a successful attack on a single system.
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#7That's twice in a short time now - 'coincidence' on Ian Fleming's scale. A third time is enemy action. Airlines do seem like a pretty juicy target for cyber war operations - you can cause a gigantic amount of disruption with a successful attack on a single system.
That seems like quite a leap given how often complex computer systems fail without any malicious act.
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#8Let's just be thankful that we haven't had a major air-based catastrophe due to an outage or hacking!
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#9I have a nagging (intuition? feeling?) that software safety/reliability/security needs are going to explode soon (because unreliabilities multiply in non-resilient systems interacting with each other) and that these are simply foreshocks.
(yeah, I know security is already a huge deal, but as we come to trust software systems more and more, the safety/reliability factor will come more into play)
EDIT: This is also part of the reason I've been learning Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/) since it's based on the highly-resilient Erlang and is designed to embrace failure. This was also informed by me reading Nassim Taleb's book "Antifragile" as well as "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by the (late) Donella Meadows.
Re: United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem
#10Nice reminder about a "glitch" happening in one of the datacenters use at the airline I used to work.
Went like this: Guy who shows around the new datacenter/ops guy demonstrated how the emergency power off works by lifting the protection plate. Protection plate unhinges suddenly and droppes onto emergency power off button. Hilarity ensues.