Submission + - How transparent should companies be when operational technology failures happen? 1
supernova87a writes: Last week, Southwest Airlines had an epic crash of IT systems across their entire business, when "a router failure caused the airlines' systems to crash... and all backups failed, causing flight delays and cancellations nationwide and costing the company probably $10 million in lost bookings alone." Huge numbers of passengers, crew, airplanes were stranded as not only reservations systems, but scheduling, dispatch, and other critical operational systems had to be rebooted over 12 hours. Passenger delays directly attributable to this incident continued to trickle down all the way from Wednesday to Sunday as the airline recovered.
Aside from the technical issues of what happened, what should a public facing company's obligation be to discuss what happened in full detail? Would publicly talking about the sequence of events before and after failure help restore faith in their operations? Perhaps not aiming for Google-levels of admirable disclosure (as in this 18-minute cloud computing outage where a full post-mortem was given) — but should companies aim to discuss more openly what happened? And how they recover from systems failures?
Aside from the technical issues of what happened, what should a public facing company's obligation be to discuss what happened in full detail? Would publicly talking about the sequence of events before and after failure help restore faith in their operations? Perhaps not aiming for Google-levels of admirable disclosure (as in this 18-minute cloud computing outage where a full post-mortem was given) — but should companies aim to discuss more openly what happened? And how they recover from systems failures?
