FAA Debacle | That moment when a corrupted database file halts nationwide air travel...
Patrick T Campbell
Senior Strategic Technical Marketing Engineer @ Nutanix | Cloud Infrastructure
3,000 cancellations, almost 10,000 delays in U.S. Wednesday January 11, 2023
Most of what we do relies on highly available, extremely resilient IT infrastructure. When the stakes are high—like competing for your business online for anything from tickets to Taylor Swift or fulfilling an online order for pet food—for profit digital assets used for IT infrastructure are do or die for the business.
The FAA on the other hand is an agency that is designed for the safety of all airline travel in the US instead of profits. Their mission is critical to all of us. The debacle this week on January 11 2023 was completely avoidable. The culprit, according to officials at the FAA, was a corrupted database file. It was not a cyber attack as far as they know before any investigation gets underway. Both primary and backup systems failed while using a 30-year old software program. FAA officials are blaming this mishap on an edit introduced by contractors. The contracting agency issued a bus tire alert to all its employees—just kidding.
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What's next? ROI Strategy
A return on investment (ROI) strategy for any organization's IT infrastructure must include, "What is the cost to the organization when technology fails?" The cost could be a loss of income, loss of time, loss of brand, or even loss of life in some instances. When an organization holds on to aging infrastructure or chooses a solution that "breaks" easily, they are subject to huge risks.
As each day goes on without modernization, an organization is theoretically saving money time and effort. If the cost of what would happen if things go wrong is not significant then it would be fine. The same goes for choosing a cheaper solution that might not hold up to failure conditions. However, if a primary system and backup system fail at a critical time, some organizations will be scrambling to fix the issue at a much higher cost.
The FAA chose not to modernize and allowed a corrupt file to hose up both primary and backup systems. The FAA was responsible for unprecedented nationwide flight delays. Don't be an FAA.