Apparently, The Airline Industry Hasn't Learned About Backups

from the incredible dept

It seems that the airline industry has never learned the importance of having backup systems. While that might be okay in some industry, in something like the airline industry, where the computers control everything, having a computer system go down is ridiculously costly. It seems like every few months there's yet another story of an airline (or airport) computer system going down, stranding people, delaying flights and causing all sorts of mayhem. A few months ago it was both USAir and Delta subsidiary Comair, and today United's reservation system went down for a while.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    nonuser, 22 Feb 2005 @ 5:05am

    presumably they're using fault tolerant systems

    All hardware and software mirrored with no single point of failure, and probably extra redundancy within the storage network.
    The administrators and DBAs are always a potential point of failure, though... if they screw up things can get nasty. Also, even fault tolerant systems don't eliminate downtime (scheduled or otherwise), they just make the occurrences orders of magnitude less frequent.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.