Skip to main content

FAA Outage: System Downtime Puts an Entire Industry on Hold

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

"The US aviation sector was struggling to return to normal following a nationwide ground stop imposed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) early Wednesday over a computer issue that forced a 90-minute halt to all US departing flights," Reuters reported on January 11.


The breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions, Associated Press reported. The system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until midmorning Wednesday. The FAA took the rare step of preventing any planes from taking off for a time, and the cascading chaos led to more than 1,300 flight cancellations and 9,000 delays by early evening on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

The FAA said a corrupted file affected both the primary and backup systems.

Speaking of tech problems impacting the aviation industry, this happened only a couple weeks after Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown during the holidays. National Public Radion reported: "By all accounts Southwest was using badly outdated computer systems to manage that complicated system."

But from the IT Ops perspective, the real take away from this news is not specifically about the FAA or the airline industry. Every organization faces this same concern every day — keeping systems updated and up and running. The alternative can be disastrous.

Many, if not most, companies in the US could not take a hit of this caliber and still maintain business as usual

"Today's FAA outage underscores the great need for modernized infrastructure, especially within organizations that operate on antiquated systems," said Fred Koopmans, BigPanda CPO. "The impact to travelers is obvious in this case, but it's imperative to also consider the internal mechanics the FAA will now have to address to recover from this."

Koopmans continued, "The average cost of a significant IT outage, according to 2022 research, is $6,912/minute or $414,720/hour – that's a $7.4M price tag for the FAA based on reports that issues arose at 3pm ET on Tuesday. Many, if not most, companies in the US could not take a hit of this caliber and still maintain business as usual."

"The outdated SaaS systems that many airlines rely upon are difficult to operate and run using older coding languages that few people still know how to use efficiently," explained Peter Pezaris, SVP of Strategy & User Experience at New Relic. "This means that when issues occur, they can be difficult to locate and fix — especially in a timely manner. Beyond that, they are also susceptible to cascading events, when a system fails and goes on to cause a ripple effect. As companies scale and the average tech stack becomes more complex, the risk of outages only rises. Not only is the IT team trying to get the system back up and running, but they are also fielding what can be a massive influx of requests ranging from internal stakeholders up to the Board level or customer complaints."

"Minimizing the time to understand the issue is critical," Pezaris added. "What makes this difficult is that most companies have observability data scattered everywhere. Observability unifies an organization's data and can provide airlines with a 360-degree view of their entire IT stacks, allowing engineers to detect and resolve issues before they impact flights."

Recently published data from New Relic's 2022 Observability Forecast shows that 45% of respondents experience an outage with a high business impact once per week or more — and 29% of those outages take an hour or more to resolve.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

FAA Outage: System Downtime Puts an Entire Industry on Hold

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

"The US aviation sector was struggling to return to normal following a nationwide ground stop imposed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) early Wednesday over a computer issue that forced a 90-minute halt to all US departing flights," Reuters reported on January 11.


The breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions, Associated Press reported. The system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until midmorning Wednesday. The FAA took the rare step of preventing any planes from taking off for a time, and the cascading chaos led to more than 1,300 flight cancellations and 9,000 delays by early evening on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

The FAA said a corrupted file affected both the primary and backup systems.

Speaking of tech problems impacting the aviation industry, this happened only a couple weeks after Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown during the holidays. National Public Radion reported: "By all accounts Southwest was using badly outdated computer systems to manage that complicated system."

But from the IT Ops perspective, the real take away from this news is not specifically about the FAA or the airline industry. Every organization faces this same concern every day — keeping systems updated and up and running. The alternative can be disastrous.

Many, if not most, companies in the US could not take a hit of this caliber and still maintain business as usual

"Today's FAA outage underscores the great need for modernized infrastructure, especially within organizations that operate on antiquated systems," said Fred Koopmans, BigPanda CPO. "The impact to travelers is obvious in this case, but it's imperative to also consider the internal mechanics the FAA will now have to address to recover from this."

Koopmans continued, "The average cost of a significant IT outage, according to 2022 research, is $6,912/minute or $414,720/hour – that's a $7.4M price tag for the FAA based on reports that issues arose at 3pm ET on Tuesday. Many, if not most, companies in the US could not take a hit of this caliber and still maintain business as usual."

"The outdated SaaS systems that many airlines rely upon are difficult to operate and run using older coding languages that few people still know how to use efficiently," explained Peter Pezaris, SVP of Strategy & User Experience at New Relic. "This means that when issues occur, they can be difficult to locate and fix — especially in a timely manner. Beyond that, they are also susceptible to cascading events, when a system fails and goes on to cause a ripple effect. As companies scale and the average tech stack becomes more complex, the risk of outages only rises. Not only is the IT team trying to get the system back up and running, but they are also fielding what can be a massive influx of requests ranging from internal stakeholders up to the Board level or customer complaints."

"Minimizing the time to understand the issue is critical," Pezaris added. "What makes this difficult is that most companies have observability data scattered everywhere. Observability unifies an organization's data and can provide airlines with a 360-degree view of their entire IT stacks, allowing engineers to detect and resolve issues before they impact flights."

Recently published data from New Relic's 2022 Observability Forecast shows that 45% of respondents experience an outage with a high business impact once per week or more — and 29% of those outages take an hour or more to resolve.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...