- 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.”
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.
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.
Play that out to its logical conclusion.
- Our example airline suddenly doubles or triples its IT budget.
- The increased costs don’t actually increase profit it merely increases resiliency
- Other airlines don’t do this.
- Our example airline has to increase ticket prices or fees to cover the increased IT spending.
- Other airlines don’t do this.
- Customers start predominantly flying the other airlines with their cheaper fares.
- Our example airline goes out of business, or gets acquired by one of the other airlines
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.
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.
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.
- inventory agents
- OS patching
- security vulnerability scanning
- file and DB level backup
- monitoring and alerting
- remote access management
- PAM management
- secrets management
- config managment
…the list goes on.
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.
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.
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.
customers start predominantly flying the other airlines with cheaper fares
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.
Our example airline has to increase ticket prices or fees to cover the increased IT spending.
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?
