All systems stop
Why big firms like Delta find it so hard to eliminate glitches from their IT systems
EARLY in the morning of August 8th, streams of bleary-eyed passengers arrived at London’s Heathrow airport, hoping for a smooth ride across the Atlantic with Delta Air Lines, America’s second-largest carrier. But most did not realise they were the first victims of the most disruptive IT glitch that has hit an airline in recent years until they got to check-in desks unable to access their details. The snafus—caused by a computer outage 4,000 miles away in Delta’s Atlanta HQ—prompted the airline to cancel more than 2,000 flights, delay several hundred thousand passengers’ journeys, and in some places go back to printing boarding passes on dot-matrix machines fit to be museum pieces.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “All systems stop”
From the August 13th 2016 edition
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