The Story Behind the FAA Flight-Plan System Crash
eWeek has an article about Thursday’s crash of the FAA’s flight-plan filing system and the background behind the system. I’m amazed but not surprised that a single router managed to take down the national system. I’ve seen some wild outages caused by a single rogue network device back in my network engineering days.
When the router went offline, only the system maintainer—government telecommunications contractor Harris—knew that the backup card was not immediately available, and that one technician, who hadn't come to work yet that day, had the key to the storage closet where the part was kept. So the FAA had to wait until this technician was able to come to the site in Salt Lake City to replace the faulty card inside the router, reconfigure the software, and get the communications backbone back up and running so that the nation's air traffic could get back to normal.