- 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.
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.