Computer Issue Affecting Some Airlines Resolved: American Airlines (nbcchicago.com) 17
American Airlines said Friday Sabre had faced a brief technical issue that impacted multiple carriers. The issue has, however, been resolved. From a report on NBC Chicago: A technical issue at with a computer IT firm briefly caused technical problems for airlines in the United States early Friday afternoon, according to American Airlines. It was one of several air carriers affected by the outage at Sabre, which tweeted about 12:45 p.m. ET that it was working on recovering from unspecified issues customers were facing. American didn't provide more details about what systems and airlines were affected. Reports on Twitter indicated outages at American, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue; all three responded to several tweets about saying computers, kiosks or the website not working.
Editor much? (Score:4, Insightful)
"A technical issue at with a computer..."
Slashdot has been getting harder to read because of what I assume to be the army of paid political shills chiming into every conversation about politics - which in my opinion doesn't belong on slashdot - but when the GOD DAMNED EDITORS CAN'T EVEN FORMULATE A SENTENCE?!?
Re: (Score:3)
Not the editors. My bet was this was copy/pasted from a news generator bot. A lot of news organizations are using them now to generate articles faster than a human could review and report.
Re: (Score:2)
"A technical issue at with a computer..."
Slashdot has been getting harder to read because of what I assume to be the army of paid political shills chiming into every conversation about politics - which in my opinion doesn't belong on slashdot - but when the GOD DAMNED EDITORS CAN'T EVEN FORMULATE A SENTENCE?!?
"I'm sorry, we could not translate your post."
You can be a formulate sentence.
Re: (Score:2)
but when the GOD DAMNED EDITORS CAN'T EVEN FORMULATE A SENTENCE?!?
It's a direct quote from TFA. So at best the editors should have appended a [sic], but then again that would also have required some editing.
HPE/EDS offshoring the mainframers? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Computer Issue" is a bit vague. I wonder what actually happened?
Sabre is pretty damn bulletproof. The core of it is ancient mainframe code that I'm sure hasn't changed since the good old days of zero-downtime systems. The upper layers, of course, have been replaced with something a little more modern but the model is still the same. It's so much the same that things like terminal screen layouts, message formats, etc. can never change or all dependent systems/services/layers must be changed to work around the change. Somehow I doubt the mainframe itself failed -- systems like that are designed to handle multiple component failures. Unless it's environmental, I'd imagine the issue has something to do with code changes or something that breaks that tower of dependencies.
What I do know is that Sabre's data center environment was run by EDS, which is now HPE, and which is soon to be CSC. I wonder if, in true IT services company fashion, they just started randomly laying off senior mainframers and sending the work offshore. This is extremely common everywhere in airline IT. Airlines are surprisingly low margin businesses, and there aren't too many people who know how the crazy web of old and new airline IT stuff works at a super-senior level. There have been a lot of high profile cases with UK banks who are heavily mainframe dependent (RBS, NatWest, etc.) who have been taken partially or completely offline due to mainframe upgrade failures associated with offshore IT workers. I wouldn't be shocked if this was something similar, especially with EDS/HPE/CSC involved.
I'm about 20 years into an IT career and have had the extreme luck to work in environments that have a healthy mix of old and new. Core TPF stuff will eventually go away but it's going to take a Herculean effort and a target environment as bulletproof as the mainframe it's replacing to work out right. In the run-up to Y2K, anyone knowing COBOL and other "senior" languages and platforms had a nice window of opportunity to deploy fixes. Now, I think the opportunity is bigger with all the mainframers who actually know what they're doing set to retire. Problem is, you'll never convince a recent grad to learn this stuff -- everyone's chasing the latest RESTful JavaScript based framework. Speaking from experience, anyone willing to work with a mix of technology is very useful to the right company/industry; I think IT folks should be really working on their generalist skills!
Re: HPE/EDS offshoring the mainframers? (Score:2)