- Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
- The airline canceled more than 4,000 flights in the wake of the outage, which was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update and took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline.
- Bastian, speaking from Paris, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
That sounds easy to say, but in execution it would be massively complicated. Modern enterprises are littered with 3rd party services all over the place. The alternative is writing and maintaining your own solution in house, which is an incredibly heavy lift to cover the entirety of all services needed in the enterprise. Most large enterprises are resources starved as is, and this suggestion of having redundancy for any 3rd party service that touches mission critical workloads would probably increase burden and costs by at least 50%. I don’t see that happening in commercial companies.
As far as the companies go, their lack of resources is an entirely self-inflicted problem, because they’re won’t invest in increasing those resources, like more IT infrastructure and staff. It’s the same as many companies that keep terrible backups of their data (if any) when they’re not bound to by the law, because they simply don’t want to pay for it, even though it could very well save them from ruin.
The crowdstrike incident was as bad as it was exactly because loads of companies had their eggs in one basket. Those that didn’t recovered much quicker. Redundancy is the lesson to take from this that none of them will learn.
Play that out to its logical conclusion.
The end result is all operating airlines are back to the prior stance.
Two big assumptions here.
First, multiple business systems are already being supported, and the OS only incidentally. Assuming double or triple IT costs is very unlikely, but feel free to post evidence to the contrary.
Second, a tight coupling between costs and prices. Anyone that’s been paying attention to gouging and shrinkflation of the past few years of record profits, or the doomsaying virtually anywhere the minimum wage has increased and businesses haven’t been annihilated, would know this is nonsense.
The suggestion the poster made was that ALL 3rd party services need to have an additional counterpart for redundancy. So we’re not just talking about a second AV vendor. We have to duplicate ALL 3rd party services running on or supporting critical workloads to meet what that poster is suggesting.
…the list goes on.
You’re suggesting the companies simply take less profits? Those company’s board of directors will get annihilated by shareholders. The board would be voted out with their IT improvement plans, and replace with those that would return to profitability.
And yes, taking less profits to distinguish your product as a prestige brand is fairly common.
In luxury goods, absolutely. In commodity goods, not so much. The airlines that had the nationwide disruptions are most certainly commodity.
Even load-balancing multiple servers in a homogenous network, where patches are only deployed in phases is better (and a best practice) than what, to outside observers, appears to have been everything going down due to a mass update everywhere, all at once.
This is where reason gets subjective. If you’re solving for resiliency against a bad patch, then absolutely, do a small test deployment before pushing everywhere. This is a balance that whatever is being patched is less of a risk than the patch itself.
However, look at what is being patched in this case: AV/malware protection. In this case, you’re knowingly leaving large portions of your fleet open to known, documented, and in-the-wild, vulnerabilities. In the past 10 years we’ve seen headlines littered with large organizations being downed by cryptolocker style malware. Only doing a partial deployment of this AV/malware protection means you’re intentionally leaving yourself open to the latest and greatest crytolocker (among other things). This is a balance where the risk of whatever being patched is more of a risk than the patch itself.
Seeing as we’ve only really had this AV/malware scanner problem hit the headlines in the last 10 or 15 years, and cryptolocker/malware nearly monthly for the last 10 to 15 years, it would appear on the surface that pushing the patches immediately actually the better idea.
Which of the things you listed have kernel-level access?
Kernel level access isn’t a requirement the poster @[email protected] placed on their suggestion that all 3rd party services should have at least one duplicate 3rd party service serving each function.
There is an argument to be made that they IT team and infrastructure isn’t supposed to be an ongoing expense or revenue generation. It’s insurance against catastrophe. And if you wanna pivot to something profit generating then you can reassign them to improve UX or other client impacting things that can result in revenue gain. For example notification systems for flight delays are absolute garbage IMO. I land, I check in my flights app and it doesn’t show any changes to when my flight is departing, I load google and those changes are right there. Or they could add maps for every airport they operate a flight from to their apps. They could streamline the process for booking a replacement flight when your incoming flight is delayed or you missed a connecting flight (i had to walk up to a desk, wait in a queue with dozens of other people for half an hour just to be stampped with a new boarding pass and moved along). They could add an actual notification system for when boarding starts (my turkish air flight at one airport didnt have an intercom so i didnt know it was boarding and missed the fligbt). All of these are just examples but my point is theres an inherent shortsightedness in assuming an investment in IT, especially for a company that deals primairly with interconnectivity, is wasted. This is the reason everything is so sh*tty for users. Companies prefer minimising costs to maximising value to the user even if the latter can generate long term revenue and increase user retention.
I was with you till this part, except with the way flying is set up in this country, there’s very little competition between airlines. They’ve essentially set themselves up with airports/hubs so if an airline is down for a day, that’s kinda it unless you want to switch to a different airport.
In the USA besides very small cities, this isn’t my experience. My flights out of my home airport are spread across 5 or 6 airlines. My city doesn’t even break into the top ten largest in the nation. As far as domestic destinations, There are usually 3 to 5 airlines available as choices.
Or they could just cut already excessive executive bonuses…
You know they’re not going to do that, so how useful is it to suggest that? If we just want to talk about pie-in-the-sky fixes then sure, but at the end of that we’ll likely have nationalized airlines, which that isn’t happening either.
So are we talking about fantasy or things that can actually happen?
No, we’re talking about things that should happen and things that should be called out every time.
Not just throwing up our hands and going “welp, they won’t willingly do it so there’s nothing we can do” like you seem to be doing.
This is what I’m doing.
This is NOT what I’m doing. Just because I don’t think the suggested approach is viable doesn’t mean that NO approach is viable.