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So this morning as I was rushing to get my boys to the bus stop, I heard some rumbling on the TV that all airline travel was suspended until 8 AM central time. I was curious, but also in a rush to get out the door. I wondered if anybody on my LinkedIn network had any insights as to what was happening. I posted a poll asking my mostly cybersecurity minded peers if it was a cyber attack or not. As of right now, 61% of us thought it was malicious. The president has stated that this was not the case, which is great news to hear.
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So this leads me to my next set of questions. How could this have happened and what could we do to prevent it. Reading into it (unverified information from what I took the time to gather), it seems it was a bad software update to an antiquated system and they were able to roll back the changes to a previously known good state. Awesome and great news.
But I’m thinking, what was the impact of delaying or cancelling all those flights to an already struggling airline industry? A few million dollars? Billions? This doesn’t just impact business people trying to catch their next flight. This also affects shipping (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.). I also bet there was a domino effect, as some of those pilots fly to their airport to pilot their flights.
What could have been done better? I’m armchair quarterbacking here. I don’t know the aviation system that was down. I do know there should have been a formal process for a system as important as this one. A change management process to be specific. Somebody needs to suggest a change, it needs a formal approval, it needs to be tested on test systems, a maintenance window needs to be planned, backup processes need to be in place, execution needs to take place, and a lessons learned needs to be done.
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I get it’s probably an antiquated system and there is a bunch of government bureaucracy that makes these types of systems stay in the stone age. I hope we can learn something from this and prevent something like this from happening in the future.