United Airlines requested a nationwide ground stop for all flights, both mainline and regional, due to a computer issue. Flights are unable to take off, though flights already in the air continue to their destinations.
This used to be a common occurrence for the airline.
We are experiencing a systemwide technology issue and are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights that are already airborne are continuing to their destination as planned. We will share more information as it becomes available. Thank you for your patience as we…
— United Airlines (@united) September 5, 2023
Once the issue is fixed, and flights are allowed to depart, we’re not just looking at delays – delays of those flights which were held and delays of subsequent flights which were to be operated by the same planes and crew. We’re also looking at additional further delays later in the day as a result of crew timing out. And then planes are going to end the day out of position, so there may be knock-on effects tomorrow as well.
@ Gary — Don’t worry, I’m sure United will compensate everyone with a $20 voucher good towards their next cancelled United flight.
Thanks for the 411!
Ground stop lifted by 1:50pm EDT.
@Gene, make that a $10 food voucher for a $25 hot dog.
And forget about renting a car in any of the cities where these planes land.
United showing once again why I consider them a last resort airline.
This is only the beginning of major technology woes across the board. Things will not improve overall, but continue to degrade. We need to get used to it and hope we’re lucky.
When airlines should be investing in their flight technology instead of buybacks and paying executives to sit around collecting money.
It’s time for these airlines to get into the 21st century and move their infrastructure to AWS or Google Cloud.
Like I tell my end users, an outage at one of those services is so rare that it’s like a plane crash and make the front page of the Journal or the Times.
And if they don’t believe me, I tell them to go shopping on the Amazon shopping site on any normal random day and see and remember how fast the site is; then go on Black Friday when damn near the whole country is on there shopping and the site will be up and running just a fast as if it was any other random day.
When was the last time that anyone saw the Amazon shopping site or NetFlix go down?
Jack,
I’m not sure where United is with cloud computing but Delta specifically has said that it has spent alot on cloud computing either as the primary or backup.
And let’s not forget that AWS and other cloud providers do have localized equipment failures but they are large enough to have redundancy that keeps from impacting users. Airlines have simply not developed the level of redundancy whether they use mainframe or cloud computing in part because they operate on so many programs – some in-house and some provided by others.
It is also worth noting that Delta is the only large airline in the world that operates its own in-house res system (which is also used by some Delta partners like Virgin Atlantic) and DL also started rebuilding its IT systems later than other carriers but made a bigger leap forward than major competitors. Like so many things, new technology is much better suited to adapting to future changes and enhancements and DL has had an advantage in that regard.
It’s tech. It happens. I don’t think it was too long of an outage. Good for them for a quick recovery. Like Southwest which took a week to recover. These things are going to happen. If they handle it well, good for them.
@Tim Dunn,
Sticking with AWS since that’s what I’m most familiar with, the whole very profitable point is that AWS makes the same infrastructure upon which they run their own services like Amazon Shopping available to anyone willing to pay, the infrastructure is scalable up to whatever the customer needs, and the customer pays only for what they use. So when demand is low, the customer uses fewer resources and when demand surges, the infrastructure scales, demand is met, (if the software is up to it) and the customer pays more. That is simply something that can’t be done with in-house infrastructure: either the CIO buys and maintains insufficient resources for peak demand (almost all of them) or the (very rare) CIO buy enough resources for peak demand and it sits idle most of the time, wasting financial resources.
Most U.S. businesses have long forgotten what it means to offer great customer service, to get it done fast and get it done right; they are now hell-bent on spending the least amount possible and the customer be damned: he can wait as long as it takes, which guarantees that it won’t be fast and most likely won’t be what the customer wants. And that goes double for airlines since most cities are reasonably only served by one domestic carrier so you can take what they offer or leave it and try another carrier which probably offer fewer flight, no direct flights, and miserable connections.
I’d be love to hear when the was the last time Amazon shopping melted down; I simply can’t remember and I visit the shopping site multiple times a day at different times.
As for the actual applications, it doesn’t matter whether it’s homegrown or licensed from a developer: if AWS infrastructure supports the required OS, the application can run on AWS (assuming the license from a developer allows it).
If the application is not properly designed or optimized, then it won’t help to put it on AWS since the application, usually the database upon which the app is built, won’t be able to scale up or it may just not be correctly designed for the job it’s trying to do; a good example is the Southwest Airlines crew app that failed during their Christmas meltdown which was simply a POS right out of the box and no matter where it was running was simply not correctly designed for the job that needed to be done.
In my view, the airlines should take a page out of Netflix’s playbook: A company who’s existence depends on very sophisticated software that needs to process a huge number of requests in real-time should leave the infrastructure management to a company that does it the best like AWS and concentrate on making sure that their software is up to the tasks upon which their business depends.