- 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.”
Yeah… Maybe don’t put all your IT eggs in one basket next time.
Delta is the one that chose to use Crowdstrike on so many critical systems therefore the fault still lies with Delta.
Every big company thinks that when they outsource a solution or buy software they’re getting out of some responsibility. They’re not. When that 3rd party causes a critical failure the proverbial finger still points at the company that chose to use the 3rd party.
The shareholders of Delta should hold this guy responsible for this failure. They shouldn’t let him get away with blaming Crowdstrike.
So you think Delta should’ve had a different antivirus/EDR running on every computer?
I think what @riskable@programming.dev was saying is you shouldn’t have multiple mission critical systems all using the same 3rd party services. Have a mix of at least two, so if one 3rd party service goes down not everything goes down with it
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.
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.
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.
