Release It!, 2nd Edition

Consequences

Three hours might not sound like much, especially when you compare that to some legendary outages. (British Airways’ global outage from June 2017—blamed on a power supply failure—comes to mind, for example.) The impact to the airline lasted a lot longer than just three hours, though. Airlines don’t staff enough gate agents to check everyone in using the old systems. When the kiosks go down, the airline has to call in agents who are off shift. Some of them are over their 40 hours for the week, incurring union-contract overtime (time and a half). Even the off-shift agents are only human, though. By the time the airline could get more staff on-site, they could deal only with the backlog. That took until nearly 3 p.m.

It took so long ...