A couple of weeks back Delta Air Lines cancelled thousands of flights.
At first it was attributed to a combination of a “software glitch” and power cut. Next the power company responded, saying there had been no disruption to services in the area.
In a statement to the press, the company’s CEO finally shed some light on the source of the mass cancellations – an electrical component had failed and some servers weren’t connected to backup power.
The result? Tens of thousands of customers enduring a torrid few days and a reported $120 million dollar loss.
The event highlights how easily a complex IT environment can fail, especially when hybrid estates involve a mix of owner-operated data centers, co-location and cloud technologies.
It also demonstrates how data center dependent we have become – almost every industry relies on a data center to operate and the cost of a failure is massive. It costs $8,851 dollars for every minute of data center downtime.
Delta joins a long list of airlines that have suffered IT malfunctions – JetBlue, Air New Zealand and Southwest Airlines to name a few.
Southwest’s outage is estimated to have cost $82 million. The cost of the outage is more than just lost time and revenue – there are refunds, compensation vouchers, staff overtime and damage to the brand’s image.
The mechanical and electronic components of a plane used to be all a passenger had to worry about failing, now you might not even make it off the ground due to a crashed check-in system or a drop in a mobile app that hosts your electronic boarding pass.
Delta is investing over $150 million in improving its IT, however without real-time visibility into where systems are, no amount of money can prevent a situation such as this week’s from happening again.
The reasons behind the outage are unfolding each day, however one fact is clear – if you operate an airline, now is the time to assess the resilience of your data center environments.
See how Vodafone protects their data centers against distratous downtime. Download this customer case study today.
