Oh No, Not Again!?! How A Second Global IT Outage Suggests Delta Airlines Still Has No Decent Disaster Recovery Strategy
In August, I blogged about my experience with the Delta outage and provided some lessons learned from those calamitous few summer days. With over 650 cancelled flights (and thousands of frustrated customers), I speculated that their disruption in services must have cost them many millions of dollars in damages. And all caused by what was reported as a "small fire" in Delta's datacenter. Painful, but invaluable, lessons learned, right?
Well, maybe not.
Delta experienced another outage this January. And I, once again, got caught up in it. My flight scheduled for a 6 pm departure from Minneapolis on January 31 had already boarded. I had stowed my stuff, buckled up and was finishing my email. We were just waiting to taxi out, when the pilot comes on the air to announce that the flight had to stop because Delta systems worldwide had gone down. Uh, oh...
15 hours later
My flight finally departed the next morning, and along the way, I witnessed first-hand a textbook example of how not to handle an outage - or your customers. Now, don't get me wrong. I am and remain a fan of Delta. I recognize that they compete in a ferocious marketplace and that some passengers are never happy. But I do think they deserve some unflinching criticism.
Five lessons, revisited
For your easy reading reference, here's a quick summary of my five lessons:
- Introduce
physical security, safety, and personnel security measures, including having
appropriate background checks and security clearance for employees, partners, and
vendors.
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