If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt it, the blame will fall squarely on the team who were asking for IT investment, and not the leadership who said no to them.

So accurate, it just happened:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/28/southwest_outdated_it...

If IT is smart, there will be a paper trail to prove these asks were made/denied.

I knew someone who was working on this, my understanding was technology infrastructure was a huge blocker to their plans for international flights. The scheduling system required many hours of downtime every night to process. It effectively ran from the moment the last airport on the west coast closed to start of operations next day east coast and it was just getting longer.

>You can only get away with that sort of debt for so long.

Kevlin Henney has recently suggested we should stop calling it technical debt, and start calling it technical neglect instead.

Managed debt is a useful thing, if you ignore debt, you end up out of business.