United Airlines Massive Computer Crash Leads To Handwritten Boarding Passes

from the so-retro dept

Hopefully, you weren't flying United Airlines yesterday. As you may have heard, the company had a massive computer crash, which caused chaos at many airports. These kinds of things aren't new, but this one did seem quite impressive in terms of how much it impacted. Still, what interests me is that the airline sought to deal with no computers by handwriting boarding passes, some of which people started photographing and putting on Twitter.

Moira Forbes got one that at least looked kinda sorta like a normal boarding pass, done on a boarding pass blank: A James Fortune got a similar one that was a bit messier with the handwriting: And, finally, someone going by the name jmeg on Twitter didn't even get a boarding pass blank, but just sheet of paper. A few months ago, I ended up flying on the day that Virgin America chose to "switch over" its computer system. While they warned us a week ahead of time, they still suggested we show up early and noted that getting boarding passes would be more manual. In that case, they had pre-printed them all out before the systems were shut off, and then had to flip through the stack to find the right one. Even that took more time than usual, so I can only imagine the mess of having to do boarding passes by hand.

But what fascinates me about this is how people figure out how to cope when computer systems go down. Every so often we have these fear mongering stories about computer crashes, and we learn about how the Y2K bug could lead to the end of society or some computer hackers could create havoc by attacking key computers. And while there are computers that run some critical systems, even in situations like this -- where the computers are incredibly important -- when they go down it may create a major pain in the ass for some, but it's not the end of the world. People figure out ways to cope and to use alternative systems, such as handwriting boarding passes. It's not perfect, and there were plenty of people who didn't get to fly at all, but it's not like civilization broke down. Computer systems fail, people deal with it, and everyone gets on with their lives.

Filed Under: boarding pass, computers, crash
Companies: united airlines

In A Connected World, Where Everyone Has A Voice, Customers Win

from the welcome-to-the-modern-world dept

One of the key underlying themes about the posts we write here -- whether they're about RIAA lawsuits or public policy or business models or security through obscurity or anything else, really -- is that one of the amazing things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice. And when everyone has a voice, the customer wins. Period. Customers will always be able to get the word out if you screw them over, and so any business has to be focused on providing positive value to customers, not pissing them off. A great example of how old school companies still don't get this (and what happens in response) was sent in by Jeremy Oudit, alerting us to how singer Dave Carroll dealt with a horrible customer service experience with United Airlines. Basically, United broke an expensive guitar in transit and refused to do anything about it. So, he started writing songs about United's terrible customer service and put them on YouTube, along with the story, and they're getting hundreds of thousands of views: This is just the first of at least three songs on the subject, called "United Breaks Guitars"... How much does all that bad publicity cost? How much would it have cost to have compensated Dave for the broken guitar?

Filed Under: business models, customer service, customers win, dave carroll, united breaks guitars
Companies: united airlines

United Airlines Shares Plummet 75% On Misinformation; Blame Game Begins

from the if-it's-on-the-internet-it-must-be-true dept

Shares of United Airlines' stock tumbled nearly 75% on Monday after an old 2002 report about a United Airlines bankruptcy filing was picked up and circulated as current. How did this happen? Apparently, a staffer at Income Securities Advisors Inc. did a search for "united bankruptcy 2008" on Google, and found an article on the Sun-Sentinel. Though the article was published in 2002, neither the Googlebot nor the Sun-Sentinel website indicated as much, and the news item was published to Income Securities' page on Bloomberg. Once the story hit the wire, shares plummeted from $12 to as low as $3, and 54 million shares traded hands before Nasdaq halted trading to investigate what was going on. After United issued an official "we're really not bankrupt" statement and the confusion started to lift, shares of United returned to a somewhat normal price.

After all the dust has settled, the finger pointing has now begun. Who is to blame, if anyone? Sure, the Sun-Sentinel published the story on its site with an ambiguous date, but having archived articles on your site isn't a problem. However, they should really make the dates on their articles more obvious, since they apparently have pretty good SEO. As for Google, they are indeed guilty of publishing an inaccurate date, but as we've seen before, their usual recourse is to blame the site for the problem, and, that said, their terms of service clearly state that they are not liable for the accuracy of their data. As for Income Securities and Bloomberg, perhaps they will be more careful next time before they publish stories, or perhaps not. The thing is, mistakes happen (like Bloomberg publishing Steve Jobs' obituary last month) and rumors turn out to be false every day. Income Securities will "pay" for their mistake, since now they will need to earn back the trust of their clients.

For stock traders, timely information translates into moneymaking opportunities. A few decades ago, it would take a few days for the market to react to information (thereby creating a nice opportunity for the shrewd trader). Today, the speed with which information travels (and the market reacts) has increased considerably, as is clearly illustrated by this event. Sure, shares of United are still trading at approximately 10% less than its opening price on Monday, but perhaps that's more a reflection of the fact that a chapter 11 filing would not come as a surprise to anyone at this time. So, it appears that, in actuality, it's pointless to assign blame, since there doesn't seem to be a problem -- the system worked just as it should.

Filed Under: bankruptcy, blame game, false report, google news, information, news, stock market
Companies: bloomberg, google, income securities, sun-sentinel, united airlines