> A power outage in Atlanta, which began at approximately 2:30 a.m. ET, has impacted Delta computer systems and operations worldwide, resulting in flight delays. Large-scale cancellations are expected today. All flights en route are operating normally. We are aware that flight status systems, including airport screens, are incorrectly showing flights on time. We apologize to customers who are affected by this issue, and our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Updates will be available on news.delta.com.

http://news.delta.com/more-flights-resume-delays-cancels-con...

That being said, of course I am much more likely to patronize businesses who do give me this type of information. Given a choice between a bank with satisfactory service and amazing transparency, and a bank with great service and no transparency, I will choose the former every time.

But government regulators opening up the working of private businesses is not a proportional response to your bill pay being unavailable for a few days.

I wonder if companies do cost-benefit analysis on those kinds of situation. "We saved X amount of £ on cutting costs. Outages as a result of cost cutting Y amount of £". You would think that at least stock holders would insist.

Okay, maybe not Comcast.

Plus doing a proper post mortem and understanding how it works woudl take a lot of time and money. Things they most of the time to not have budget for.

A while ago (when I was in aerospace) there was one senior people who gave us the price of insurance per head.

Given that we're talking about 1M€ per head and that a plane can easily have 200 people. I have a hard time finding a situation where I can expect a Return On Investment by doing things poorly and cheaply. We're talking many millions of payout.

(And yet, I'd love to have such a situation, it's always good to attract the attention of attendees at conference or student classrooms).

Then later I realized that I've made a mistake in my calculation... I'm only accounting for A SINGLE plane failing and killing everyone. In the real world, a bad component would be shipped to a whole batch of planes and they'd fall randomly like flies.

That batch-effect drastically increases the cost of failure. So... I really don't see ANY place where there is a ROI on people dying.

BAZINGA!!! I'm from Europe and people are expensive there. The trick is to manufacture things for the 3rd world market where people get peanuts when they die (sometimes even nothing) :D

But then again... we're back to square one, how could I build parts AND guarantee that they're only shipped to planes in low-cost locations? At that point, it's probably closer to a plane-by-plane targeted sabotage rather than a scheme of doing minimum-shit-to-close-sales. And when doing plane-by-plane there is no economy of scale :(

... Anyway! Just wanted to say that any analysis would clearly reveal that THE PLANE IS CHEAPER WHEN IT FLIES!!! (and your life is truly expensive) so you're fine. You can keep on using airplanes ;)

Also, people at work do have a conscience. Once in a while they may forget about the importance of what they do, luckily there is a plane crash happening every few months to remind them that there are lifes at stake, for real (in case it was ever forgotten).

Now we know this is not always true, but even giving out details about schema, data-organization or technologies used could provide more detail than is necessary.

We could argue the merits of this approach - I can certainly sympathize with the idea - but security by obscurity is still a rampant ethos in huge corporations. I wouldn't be surprised if TSA also enforced a bit of this as well.

That's one of the main goals of a postmortem: document what the cause of the problem was, not just for you, but for all interested parties. If some human caused the issue, you need to document what happened and what should be done to prevent it from re-occurring. And fix it, of course.

In the case of airlines though, they have a strong collective interest in avoiding incidents.

After the power outage of 2003, the NYISO released a post-mortem [1], but I don't remember CNN reporting on it. This is probably because it takes a significant quantity of effort to turn a detailed report into a 10-minute video.

I imagine that a youtube channel that ran post-mortems on large-scale systems would be popular.

[1] http://www.nyiso.com/public/webdocs/media_room/press_release...

Its easy for us on the outside to say "well, have a backup" or "just replace all the legacy systems", but in the real world its not that simple.

Yes, you can have a backup server, but it has to be running exactly the same software and working on a copy of the data. If some unforeseen event corrupts the database, its likely to corrupt the backup replicant in exactly the same way. Also its likely that some of the legacy systems are not designed to support replication and can't have it retrofitted with any reasonable degree of cost and risk.

Replacing a single legacy system with another system that does exactly the same thing is expensive, risky, and wins you almost nothing. You have to replace a large chunk of the whole legacy all at once, without disrupting your day to day business. This is hard to do; any project to try this is likely to fail before it really gets started.

The way to do this is to create an automatic translation tool. Furthermore, this translation tool can't be generic. Instead, it has to map the idioms of the legacy project to new code in the idioms of the new environment. Done properly, doing the port at one level of indirection like this, you can absorb all of the changes to the legacy system as they are happening, then instantly switch over when the new system is finally ready.

[0] http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx

Something like this can literally kill a semester/year of college if you arent savvy enough to deal with it. Luckily for us, tens of thousands of other customers had the same issue and the school was inundated with similar cases -- they realized something was amiss.

Incidentally, Washington Mutual refused to help -- they noted that the statement did not show my brother's name. They also noted that they cant talk to my brother since he isnt a customer!!!