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Computers may err...

Post 1

Icy North

I was interested in the story this week that they'd suffered a computer glitch at the UK's main air traffic control centre. It caused flights to be diverted and those awaiting takeoff to be cancelled for many hours on Friday evening.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30463551

I work in IT for a media company, and take turns to be the 24-hour duty manager who has to manage IT incidents when they happen. It may sound obvious, but the most important thing is to get the service back up and running as quickly as possible. When it's a particularly high-profile incident, as this air traffic control one was, then you always get more than your fair share of managers and other stakeholders pitching in and hurling blame around. You need to be protected from all this so you can think clearly, make sensible decisions and organise the people who are going to get it fixed.

Then the media get involved, and start publishing all the angry reports from delayed passengers (which is justifiable) as well as the offloading of blame from politicians (which often isn't). One thing you also see is the use of so-called 'experts' who try to explain what has happened in terms that are so simple, they're meaningless - especially when they have no information to go on.

We have to wait for the guys at NATS (the air traffic control operator) to complete their investigations, then tell us what happened.

* * *

Reports this evening say they've found a problem in a line of code:

"The challenge is that we have around 50 different systems at Swanwick and around four million lines of code. This particular glitch was buried in one of those four million lines of code."

Yeah, as if it was so difficult to find that they had to read 4,000,000 lines of code to find it. Software doesn't change itself, you know. Somebody wrote that line of code. Somebody else tested it - probably lots of times. Somebody else copied it to the live system. Everything would have been formally logged. They would have known exactly what went live just before this fault happened.

Computers may err, but to really mess it up you need a human.


Computers may err...

Post 2

Recumbentman

Hear hear. In the early days you used to hear of 'computer errors'. Yeah right.

People will always blame whoever doesn't answer back.


Computers may err...

Post 3

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

Garbage in, garbage out. I say that because I'm a non-expert who has no information to go on. smiley - winkeye


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