Delta Airline - System Down !

Hacked or power or just a system down (I was going to write crashed). This is at least the third airline to be affected in the past few months. As airlines (or any companies) stick all their systems in the cloud, they become more fragile.

In the old days, airlines ran on pieces of paper (tickets etc) but now it is all computerised -- passengers, pilots and crew, luggage -- all coordinated online.

I work(ed) in testing large computer systems. When I was taught to test, we tested to death.

New management 'techniques' came in about 6 years ago, where testing now became 'risk based', ie, don't test certain bits if you think it won't hurt too much if it goes wrong. Cheaper that way - management pleased.

However, those small areas with problems start to mount up. And you end up with multiple system failures.

Twin that with the other 'money-saving' plan of outsourcing the testing to India.... I have tested some stuff after they had, big world IT name, tested by their Indian arm, and it simply had not been done. But it was cheap.

BA terminal 5 crashed last month. Who is the IT supplier? Tata. Indian. I don't know who Delta's IT supplier is, but I would go 1.01 the work was done in India.

Do you go down often?