To some degree, sure. But they really should be capable of a straight failover (forced, if necessary) to geographically separate components.
AFAIK the failure at ATL had nothing to do with the ability for the IT network to failover. It was because the power at the airport was off, and therefor the airport was unable to fly planes. And when the world's largest airport goes dark, it causes ripples in delays across the entire country because of misplaced planes/staff/passengers. And you can't just "failover" hundreds of planes and thousands of passengers to a different geographic location.
We're really talking about two completely different types of failure here, and the other comment is right in that it's weird to compare the ATL fire to last night's failure.
Even for non-aviation-or-tech-knowledgeable people, I think most still care who is at fault for such disruptions. The article frames the ATL fire as Delta/Southwest's fault. It puts the ATL fire in the same category as other, airline-specific issues that were caused by Delta's IT systems. But that just isn't the case. The ATL fire affected every airline at ATL (but for some reason the article only calls out SW and DL), and was the fault of the airport, not the airlines. It's more similar to bad weather shutting down an airport than it is to the IT issues that Delta faced last night.
It just feels like bad reporting to include that comparison.
> Still, Delta isn’t the only U.S. carrier to have suffered from technical glitches. In December 2017, a fire at Atlanta’s airport, the world’s busiest hub, caused a major electrical disruption, crippling services and stranding thousands of passengers of Delta as well as rivals including Southwest Airlines Co.
It seems to me that Southwest's systems being brought down by fire and electrical disruption is a different "technical glitch" than the kind of systems problem Delta just had. A better comparison would be July 2016, when a router failure created a "chokepoint that crippled hundreds of the company's software applications":
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/southwest-airlines/2016/...