Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, three times is enemy action.

It could be Russia, Iran, China, climate direct action groups (probably not y'all qaeda though). Or maybe it's just ancient software running on older hardware that's starting to fall over after a couple years of lighter loads and a sudden increase in complexity and weirdness. Everything is breaking at the moment.

By "y'all qaeda" you mean the boojahideen, not actual Al-Qaeda?

Yes exactly, the gravy seals.

Just keep spreading the FBI's propaganda until your neighbors start getting disappeared for voting the wrong way, but it's no problem, they were Nazis

I mean, a one party government in the US would actually be preferable to democracy, as long as the party in power is the Democratic Party, right?

Meal Team Six?

Ah yes, the Yee-Hawdists. Vanilla ISIS. Banana Republicans. Meal Team 6. Walmartyrs.

Classic buffoonery. Until it's not.

There's also the world's biggest viral pandemic that's still ongoing and currently in a post-holiday peak where many people are out sick...

"sudden increase in complexity and weirdness"

We’re being pen tested by every other country in the world constantly.

Southwest's meltdown was definitely not an attack. Their crew scheduling software was so outdated that it required people to call in and speak to a human to report when they were out of position due to a cancelled flight. The sheer volume of cancellations resulted in this very manual system simply falling over, and so when the weather cleared up they actually had no idea where most of their crews were.

Sure, that's the publicly-reported story. Is it sufficient? Hard to tell from the outside.

Just a tiny bit of blackmailer-sabotage or vandal mischief-making – the sort of thing often underreported for legitimate reasons! – could've been the margin between some mild embarassment & the total collapse we saw. (For example: tying up the call-in lines to turn a normal hold time of minutes into hours, or long busy signals.)

Simple monocausal stories are for unsophisticated spectators.

All you're doing is letting your imagination run wild because you don't want to believe the simplest (and most likely) explanation. This isn't helpful to anyone.

It's a helpful exercise for naive young people who always believe the simple publicly-reported stories, and haven't yet had the life experience to know there's often more to the story, which only comes out years later (if ever), or via private conversations to deeply-knowledgeable personnel!

No, it's really not a helpful exercise. An actual helpful exercise is to determine when an official story doesn't make sense, and to understand that there is probably more to it. In this case, the official story make perfect sense. Doubting it is just creating fairy tales.

> perfect sense

So you just inherently believe all that is reported as fact?

Remember when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “for real really real” and we invaded Vietnam?

Or the WMDs in Iraq?

I’m not tinfoil hatting - Just calling out how interesting it is 3 major events in a documented as fragile industry happen so close.

That’s literally all I mentioned in my orig comment.

> Remember when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “for real really real” and we invaded Vietnam?

Well, no, the US military was (openly) in Vietnam in support of South Vietnam long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Heck, the US military was there (again overtly) in support of France for several years before South Vietnam existed as such. And, ironically, they were there in support of the Viet Minh – which later became both North Vietnam and the Viet Cong – even before that, with almost no break between, starting in July 1945.

Insofar as there was an international incident that led to the US invasion of Vietnam it was – though it took a few years for the response – Pearl Harbor, not the Gulf of Tonkin. All the subsequent fighting in Indochina was breakdown in relation between erstwhile allies who were all already present, after the Japanese were driven out and had surrendered.

My point was that the Tonkin incident was reported incorrectly and did not match fact; as we found out some decades later.

Tying that to this thread: why is what’s reported about the airlines taken to be fact? (And I’m not speaking as if I mean this is malicious (as the Tonkin incident was) - just reported incorrect from fact for other “capital friendly” (face saving) reasons.)

Didn’t someone say “believe half of what you read…” somewhere?

What sort of reason do you have to believe that sabotage is involved, when it is adequately explained by the positive feedback loop of out-of-position calls exceeding the rate at which the can be answered?

Why do you think I believe it was definitiely involved?

I just don't think it's ruled-out by the simple official story. Some but not all of the reasons why I believe there might be more to the story are based on decades of life experience:

* Whenever the media reports on something I know about intimately, they get it wrong, preferring pleasing simple narratives to the full details. Hence, I assume their stories on things I don't know intimately show a similar skew towards oversimplification, missing-details that are embarassing to the key actors, and audience-pleasing explanations.

* I've not ever been in IT security for a major or public company. But even in tiny organizations, I've observed strong incentives – not all misguided! – to downplay malicious mischief as a contributor to any problems. Organizations don't want to encourage the perpetrators with publicity, nor encourage copycats. Orgs also don't want to be embarassed by lax measures. From direct reports from individuals at larger organizations – and reliable public accounts of late-reported hack/extortion incidents – I believe these incentives can be even stronger at large, slow-moving, distributed-responsibility public companies (though of course the penalties for explicitly-misleading statements also larger).

* Plenty of mean, crazy, or self-interested people may have it out for Southwest, from previously-angered travellers to disgruntled employees to motivated short-sellers (individuals or formal funds). And even if the potential for sabotage was under formal investigation right now, the investigators – private or public – might want to hide that fact until definitive evidence collected & perpetrators are prosecutable. It can take months or years for the real story to emerge!

A fragile outdated system finally reaching a chaotic breaking point is one possible & sufficient answer, of course.

But it's also a potential weak-point to be pushed-over-the-edge by motivated saboteurs or extortionists. In fact, such a weak point is ideal for certain criminal schemes, because of its deniability by both perpetrator and victim as merely a problem of aged systems & incompetence.

So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.

Nothing we know about anything rules out the possibility that we might later learn something new that shows differently. But we can only make informed decisions based on what we do know, because the unknown is infinite. In the end, most occurrences in the world are just as plain as they appear.

> So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.

I don't technically disagree, but it is also just as naive to ignore our human proportionality bias and discount the relative probability of the available evidence.

But the comment that I was responding to claimed, "Southwest's meltdown was definitely not an attack." [emphasis added]

I'm not saying it definitely was an attack, nor even that it likely was. Just that it's premature to "definitely" rule it out so soon, just 3 weeks out, given the incentives involved & base rates of both extortion/vandalism & (often well-meaning but at the very-leats ass-covering) reporting-misdirection about the same.

You seem to agree with me that it remains a possibility, so not sure we actually disagree about any particulars of the event, just the discussion.

Imagine there were a well-refereed, bettable proposition like, say, "By the end of 2030, will either (a) someone be criminally charged for contributing to the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022; or (b) will a knowledgeable Southwest insider or law enforcement agent report they saw evidence that intentional acts worsened the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022?"

Just from base rates of such mischief, & without yet digging deeper, I'd consider an answer of "YES" to have around a 2-3% chance. And something with a 1-in-50 chance of having happened is absolutely a valid topic of speculation deep in forums like this!

Such tail events are where lots of the big wins, & big losses, for industry & society arrive – but also, such real-but-rarer outcomes get habitually ignored by simple mainstream summary coverage, which needs to put neat bows on stories for uninformed & distracted audiences, by short deadlines.

To protest deep in the threads, and insist that a 3-weeks old official-spokesperson story is "definitely" the whole explanation, case-closed, stop-speculating-its-hurting? That's actually hostile to helping curious people understand a complex world based on limited & conflicted information sources.

Obviously not. Southwest issue isn't even close to having to do with FAA systems. Not everything is a cyber attack... most things are just accidental systems issues.

It's weird that americans always seem to have this sort of siege mentality. We already know the causes of the other outages, and they have nothing to do with the foreign interference boogeyman.

Why do you assume I am American? Or are you speaking generally?

“We” don’t know the causes, only what was reported.

I’ve worked on a lot of old systems needing to be updated, migrated, or sunset. For sure it’s 99% of the time due to management being lazy. I get that.

And I know correlation/causation, but hey my orig comment was a simple curiosity.

Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always filtered through stockholder functions, but I still think “3 major airline issues in as many months” is kind of hilarious. Even if they seem to be in different facets.

Does this happen often but only now is it reported to “us”? Or is this truly an odd and rare timing?

>Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always filtered through stockholder functions

OK, but in Southwest's case, you had former and current employees from various positions within the company publicly coming out and lambasting Southwest for the failure to actually invest in upgrading their scheduling system that led to the outage. It wasn't just a corporation coming out and going, "Here's what we hope you believe happened," it was pissed off employees publicly fucked off that their years of complaints went unheard and now they were all paying the price for being ignored.

>Or is this truly an odd and rare timing?

It's just odd/rare. I would wager that your brain's rush to try and tie them together like this is just it's way of trying to make sense of something it normally doesn't see.

> invest in upgrading

Meaning - a system is so old, slow, bug, and vulnerability prone a bad actor can pen-test around and mess stuff up?

"Can"? Sure, just like most systems. "Did"? No, that's ignoring the fundamentals of how the system crashed. I'd recommend doing a deeper dive into what actually happened.

Actually you are right, sorry. Your comment didn't indicate that. My reply was mostly tainted by the other replies your comment got, and I assumed things I shouldn't have.

Are you so sure you have 0 people of this type in [country you are from]?

Are you sure you are not seeing selection bias because the majority of users on this site are Americans?

I think that it's still pretty unique to the US. I completely agree with your point in general, and I think that internet discussions are often centered around America, so there's a huge selection biais in online discourse. But I truly think that the "the empire is under siege"/national security discourse is much more prevalent in the US. Which makes sense considering it is the empire ;). We don't really have that where I'm from. Instead of a siege mentality, we have a prevalent inferiority complex hahaha.

It's weird how Europeans have this fedual surf mentality.

If you're going to attack them, you could at least spell some of those words correctly.

Yeah, total nonsequiter. Everybody knows Fritz and Jacque don't surf.

I'm not european, and if anything, I'm looking into moving to the US soon. I'm not trying to do the usual "americans, amirite?" thing. It's just that there is much more of a "national security angle" to every discussion like this in the US. Which is pretty unique to america I thini

Go to Israel and say that. It is a feature but it is not unique. The US is a target for a variety of reasons. While a more mundane cause is likely, the implications of an attack are significant thus it would be unwise scoff this concern off as mere paranoia.

Part of it is this intellectual one-upsmanship, especially at places like HN. People think they look smarter if they reflexively reject "the narrative".

Could just as easily be a bias in reporting given the interest in other flight related issues lately. Previously unremarkable outages like this can suddenly become newsworthy if other current events seem to give them context. Once an issue is proven to draw clicks headlines will go back to that well any chance they get.

I would think, of all forums on the internet, that this forum would realize how many heaping piles of fragile software the world is built on.