UK air traffic control meltdown

To be fair, the article suggests early on that sometimes these plans are being processed for flights already in the air (although at least 4 hours away from the UK).

If you can stop the specific problematic plane taking off then keeping the system running is fine, but once you have a flight in the air it's a different game.

It's not totally unreasonable to say "we have an aircraft en route to enter UK airspace and we don't know when or where - stop planning more flights until we know where that plane is".

If you really can't handle the flight plan, I imagine a reasonable solution would be to somehow force the incoming plane to redirect and land before reaching the UK, until you can work out where it's actually going, but that's definitely something that needs to wait for manual intervention anyway.

Giving up if something doesn't validate is indeed standard to avoid propagating badly interpreted data, causing far more complex bugs down the line. Validate soon, validate strongly, report errors and don't try to interpret whatever the hell is wrong with the input, don't try to be 'clever', because there lie the safety holes. Crashing on bad input is wrong, but trying to interpret data that doesn't validate, without specs (of course) is fraught with incomprehension and incompatibilities down the line, or unexpected corner cases (or untested, but no one wants to pay for a fully tested all-goes system, or just for the tools to simulate 'wrong inputs' or for formal validation of the parser and all the code using the parser's results).

There are already too many problems with non-compliant or legacy (or just buggy) data emitters, with the complexity in semantics or timing of the interfaces, to try and be clever with badly formatted/encoded data.

It's already difficult (and costly) to make a system work as specified, so subtle variations to make it more tolerant to unspecificied behaviour is just asking for bugs (or for more expensive systems that don't clear the purchasing price bar).

Well that's DailyMail for you, where they tag anything parenting or healthy as "femail" section... cause you know only women are looking at that stuff.

Lol.

Anyways I actually think that's just reasonable response, system goes down/related system goes down , and in reviewing they are making frivolous updates to names that aren't needed.

I would question these updates (while they may be minor part of overall updates occuring).

Except that was a completely different incident and it occurred in the United States, not the UK. The Daily Mail did try to make hay out of the idpol angle, but the British can't reasonably be accused of shirking responsibility for the FAA grounding flights in the US.