Digital Defects: Computer System Outage Causes U.S. Air Travel Disarray
From Air Travel To Error Travel
Two days ago, a cascading outage in the venerable Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions computer system, which details potential adverse impacts on flights, led to thousands of cancelled flights in the U.S.
According to the White House, there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the widespread government system computer failure.
“Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown,” stated an article from the Associated Press. “Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.
According to a statement given yesterday by the Federal Aviation Administration, ”Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file.”
Yesterday, Canada’s air traffic system suffered a similar outage.
The same day in the UK, Royal Mail was unable to send letters and packages due to a “cyber incident.”
Though computer technology has fundamentally transformed the way our culture functions, it is worth reminding ourselves that, as is true with every technology, it is an amalgam of both beneficial and detrimental components.
I will proceed here under the certain knowledge that I need not elaborate on the advantages of the computer and its usages in statistical research, science, mathematics, finance, transportation, entertainment, government, the armed forces and space exploration.
My goal here is to detail how the technology might be used in ways it was not envisioned, and what might be the expense of integrating it in so many tracts of our existence without sufficient contemplation of how a culture might be ill-treated by its business.
This is important to understand, for a highly-technological culture such as ours emboldens a kind of indifference to what sort of proficiencies may be lessened through the attainment of new ones. Indeed, I am writing about this subject because it is worth recalling what can be accomplished without computers, as is the sensibility of reminding ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.
In understanding this, several questions amongst the clear-headed must arise, such as, To whom should the blame be assigned for this series of events?, or Are humans or computers in control here?, or Could such an outcome have been anticipated beforehand?, or How does computer technology inspire change in our culture’s sense of personal responsibility?
Before I perform the light task of presenting examples of computer technology’s fallibility, I have also found use in showing how it inspires alterations in the relationship of computers to humans, for it is a truth that is not commonly perceived.
“If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy,” observed Neil Postman in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. “Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has a will, has intentions, has reasons- which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence ‘We use the computer to calculate’ comes to mean ‘The computer calculates.’ If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because ‘the computers are down.’ The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an ‘agentic shift,’ a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them.”
The author goes on to say, “Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions…I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words ‘The computer shows…’ or ‘The computer has determined…’ It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence ‘It is God’s will,’ and the effect is roughly the same.”1
But, as have already seen, there is more to the cultural modifications pioneered by computer technology than the shifting of human responsibility and sensibility.
Before I leave the subject of airline technology, it is worth mentioning, in light of the recent events in the aviation world, other ways in which the airline pilot can be afflicted by technology’s favor As reported by USA Today, an Asiana Airlines airliner crashed short of the runway at San Francisco International Airport in 2013 because the pilots did not fully understand how the plane’s automated systems functioned.
“We’ve been talking about this in the industry for years. Pilots are losing their basic flying skills, and there’s an overreliance on automation,” noted Les Westbrooks, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in comments following a Boeing 737 Max crash in March, 2019.
What is happening here is that the technology that has been put in charge of piloting airplanes, in spite of its efficiency, is instrumental in making human pilots confused about how to pilot airplanes. Who decided that airplanes are best flown by machines instead of humans, that it is in both the pilots and the passengers’ best interest, that the machine is more competent than the human hand, that computers overseeing and guiding human pilots is an auspicious course of action, and that the technology’s consequences are outweighed by its benefits, we are not told.
Nonetheless, in speaking of the computer’s dual phases, and in addition to news articles, studies and books on the subject, it has been noticed that examples are rife in popular culture and have been extensively documented on both the big screen and silver screen alike.
And it has also been noticed that many of these purportedly fictional portrayals serve as fitting allegorical representations of our true relation to the technology.
One episode of The X-Files, the American science-fiction television series, showed actor Dean Haglund hacking into a computer to grant himself a disabled parking. In the 1986 comedy film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the character played by actor Matthew Broderick hacked the school computer to remove his unexcused absences, while the same actor in the film War Games hacked his high school computer system to give himself passing grades.
Sometimes, what most see as purely fictional occurrences have actually played out in real-life examples of technological manipulation.
To be sure, dismayed at his F grade in his engineering class at the University of Central Florida, student Sami Adel Ammar logged into a faculty computer in 2017 and changed it, according to the school’s police. Even Wi-Fi has been used apart from its intended purpose, which was the case when ISIS plotted to use Wi-Fi in May, 2019, to remotely detonate backpacks full of explosives at demonstrations in Indonesia, when election results were announced.
The calling of computer hackers, or those who explore methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network, is certainly worth mentioning here, but is a subject I must pursue at length elsewhere. But from such instances of technological interventions, we can infer technology’s true framework— that technology’s uses are infinitely variable, that certain inventions can be used in uncertain designs, that technology’s effects are wildly unpredictable, that not even the founders of emerging technologies can be trusted to divine how their inventions will be exercised by the world.
And while the commingling of the computer and internet can exhort change in culture, be misused and even bring about the uncertainty of who might win and who might lose as a result of its societal infiltration, the ramifications of ways in which the tech might fall short can be far more dire.
Just one facet worth making note of is our digital systems of management that hundreds of millions depend on every day, for alongside the covenant of raised efficiency lie the risks that are taken when so much collective cultural faith is placed in our electronic and digitized processes.
To help exemplify the point, it is worth reflecting on how equipped a culture might be if their predominant technology, the internet, should fail.
And fail it did in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy struck the U.S. East Coast.
As a result of the natural disaster, several key exchanges where the undersea cables linked North America and Europe were affected, in which the entire network between the two continents was disrupted for numerous hours, no small matter in a hyper-connected world.
In another episode, The New York Times reported that when Zimbabwe shut down their internet for six days in January, 2019, the many customers at Wisdom Fore’s grocery store who possessed the funds to buy food lacked the means to access it. As a result of the many transactions in the country made through mobile payment systems, and because the system required internet access to function properly, Fore was forced to throw away the majority of his perishable food, from which he lost roughly half his daily turnover.
“In Sudan,” detailed the publication, “the interim government shut down the internet for a month, principally to obstruct opposition activity after the ouster of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But it also stopped Sudanese doctors from ordering new medicine, leading to shortages of diabetes treatment, and prevented protest leaders from using WhatsApp to call for medical assistance, according to Dr. Sara Abdelgalil, who coordinates supplies in Sudan via the internet from her home overseas.”
The same abnormality of technological dereliction is not only seen with the internet, but also with computer technology, network connectivity and other services.
On December 14, 2020, multiple Google services and websites including Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Assistant, and smart home devices integrated with Google Assistant, were down for roughly an hour after being hit with a global outage, an incident in which Google assigned blame to a glitch.
“The root cause,” as explained by Google on their cloud support page, “was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally.”
In late September, 2017, major disruptions at airports throughout the world were experienced by travelers, all due to a “network issue” which involved the Altea software, used by 125 airlines. Problems were reported by passengers at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow, as well as airports in New York, Australia, Paris, Washington, Singapore, South Korea and South Africa, among many other locations. After the systems crashed, which caused lengthy delays and long queues, travelers said they were unable to check in for their flights with a number of airlines, including British Airways, Air France, KLM, Qatar, Qantas, Lufthansa and Southwest.
According to reports, the outage affected check-in services at airports, internet browsers and mobile apps, and at the height of the outage, passengers were unable to check in, make new bookings or update existing reservations. On April 1, 2019, a computer glitch caused roughly 3,400 flight delays at airports in New York City, Chicago, Illinois, Boston, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina and Miami, Florida.
On August 16, 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection computers suffered an outage that impacted arriving travel in New York, Los Angeles, California, Houston, Texas, Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco, California, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Seattle, Washington.
One computer glitch briefly halted all air traffic in France and caused delayed flights in multiple countries on September 1, 2019. On June 15, 2021, Southwest Airlines grounded flights across the U.S. as a result of nationwide computer issues, to which the airline said the cause was “intermittent performance issues with… network connectivity.” And as for the deaths of 346 people traveling on two 737 Max airliners, blame was cast on Boeing’s software program, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
On April 6, 2019, a Y2K-like bug, known as the “GPS Rollover,” hit New York City’s NYCWiN system, in which citywide tasks like remote monitoring of traffic lights at 13,000 intersections, wireless reading of water meters, and some NYPD license plate readers were affected. On July 19, 2019, a computer system failure halted subway lines in New York City, in which some passengers were left stranded underground.
In another major internet failure, dozens of airlines, financial institutions, stock exchanges, trading platforms and other global companies were knocked offline during peak business hours in Asia on June 17, 2021. In this instance, the cause was a software bug on a service provided by the major network provider Akamai that protects customers against denial-of-service attacks.
Just days before, thousands of government, news and social media sites, including many of the world’s top websites, went offline as a result of a software disruption at the content-delivery network Fastly, in which CNN, some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, Twitch, Reddit and even Britain’s government homepage were down.
Here, the company blamed the problem on a “technical issue.”
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the outage in which Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were down for roughly six hours, one Italian user, in recounting the ordeal, remarked how “It was terrible, I had to talk to my family.”
“One of the things that we've seen in the last several years is an increased reliance on a small number of networks and companies to deliver large portions of Internet content," detailed Luke Deryckx, Chief Technical Officer at Downdetector, an outage monitoring website, to the BBC. "When one of those, or more than one, has a problem, it affects not just them, but hundreds of thousands of other services."
In speaking of a then-recent blackout of Facebook services, he went on to say, “When Facebook has a problem, it creates such a big impact for the internet but also the economy, and, you know... society. Millions, or potentially hundreds of millions, of people are just sort of sitting around waiting for a small team in California to fix something. It's an interesting phenomena that has grown in the last couple of years."
On December 7, 2021, an outage of Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud-computing service provider in the U.S., disrupted much of the company’s services, including its smart-doorbell service Ring, its voice-activated Alexa platform, its videoconferencing tool Chime, many of its corporate customers’ websites and third-party applications such as Ticketmaster, Netflix and Disney streaming services, Robinhood and Coinbase, the homework-submitting service Canvas, Disney amusement parks, as well as so-called “smart” devices like light switches, refrigerators, and iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners.
Some users of the “smart” doorbell platform Ring were greeted with the unfortunate reality of being unable to get into their homes without access to the phone app. One small business owner recounted how his internet-connected cat-food dispenser stopped working, in which he remarked to The Wall Street Journal, of his hardship, that, “We had to manually give them food like in ancient times.”
Another ill-fated soul recalled how he could not instruct his Roomba robot vacuum cleaner to suck up the blueberry-muffin crumbs on his floor, in which he told the Journal that he “had to resort to getting a broom and dustpan,” adding, “It was crazy.”
In California, one person afflicted by the ordeal told CNBC that, “I’m just glad I don’t have an internet-connected fridge.”
The news outlet wrote that, “For many consumers, it was an awakening to how many internet-enabled devices they now have in their homes and how much even some of their most basic daily needs depend on a connection to the cloud.” One person effected by the outage could not access Amazon’s Alexa service, to which he told the Journal that, “Since the pandemic, I’ve become tied to the Alexa system,” adding that, without it, “you almost have separation anxiety.” Yet another unlucky victim of the technological failure told the website, of culture’s undue reliance, “You start to worry, how vulnerable are we to this one service? It raises panic.”
Amazon’s delivery operations were also affected, to which drivers were prevented from acquiring routes or packages, in addition to its thousands of drivers being unable to communicate with the company. Doug Madory, an analyst at the network monitoring firm Kentik, told Bloomberg that, “It gets more and more complicated with software running these services, so when something goes sideways it can take a long time to figure out what went wrong and fix it.” Complexity, he said, “has risks. You introduce unknown errors.”
Another article from Bloomberg titled “How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes No So Smart After All” observed how, “The outage prompted people to reflect on the pitfalls of having a ‘smart’ home that’s overly dependent on not only the internet, but one company in particular -- while those with ‘dumb’ homes gloated that their fridges and light switches were working just fine.”
In a statement, Amazon said the problem was sparked by an automated computer program designed to make its network more reliable, which caused a “large number” of its systems to behave strangely, and which created a surge of activity on Amazon’s networks that prevented users from accessing some of its cloud services. On December 22, 2021, Amazon Web Services suffered another service outage, in which a vast number of online services, including Slack, Coinbase, Hulu and the gaming store Epic Games were disrupted.
It is in occurrences such as these that are effective in illustrating just how relatively fragile the internet’s architecture is, in addition to its reliance on a small number of Big Tech companies, like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, that are charged with running the internet. Cloud systems allow companies to rent servers, storage, network capabilities and computing power on the internet, in so doing delivering supposed promises of a reliable internet infrastructure that is always available.
But the growing episodes of outages increasingly show how the concentration of the internet’s once-distributed capabilities carries with it the consequence of a single failure resulting in wide-reaching ripple effects that, in effect, weaken the cloaked architecture that supports much of the internet. It is well to keep in mind that a single glitch in a high-profile service provider can have unprecedented effects on innumerable organizations of all kinds, service interruptions that are vast in reach and which can touch thousands of companies and millions of users.
“We receive tremendous benefits from moving older systems to modern technology -- it lowers the cost of services and capabilities, it adds efficiency, and opens up markets to individuals who might otherwise not be able to use them," noted Steve Grobman, the chief technology officer at Intel Security, to The Washington Post. "But with those benefits, we have to tolerate new issues we didn't necessarily have in a less automated environment." As put by the paper, “A glitch on your personal computer is irritating. But a glitch on a network that controls critical systems at a major organization can be massively disruptive.”
This phenomenon of digital consequences can also be noticed in our culture’s digital management systems as they relate to financial matters. In early January, 2018, a Wells Fargo glitch emptied customers’ bank accounts by double-paying their bills online, an embarrassing error that infuriated many. Cindy Alexander, Wells Fargo customer for 30 years and singer-songwriter in Los Angeles, California, was reported by CNN Business as saying, “The money is back, but I’m done with them,” adding that, “There’s enough stress in life financially. To have your bank make it harder is inexcusable.”
On January 17, 2018, Twitter user @TheBlacDaria tweeted, “…my bill pays came out twice. I didn’t sent them twice. Now my account is in the red. I’d like to eat.” Similarly, @dosconservative tweeted, “just called in- your bill pay service is duplicating outgoing bills. Why is it when I mess up, you guys charge me at least $35 (usually more), but when you mess up, it’s ‘thanks for your patience’. I expect some form of compensation for this breach of confidence and inconvenience.” Another person tweeted, “Sorry doesn’t even come close to making up for all of the stress and chaos this caused,” in response to Wells Fargo’s tweet, which mainly consisted of a meager apology. “I make a simple error and get charged a minimum of $35. You take over $1500 of my hard earned money I’m supposed to be ok with a simple ‘sorry’?!”
For those assuming that this worrying account must be an isolated incident, then perhaps highlighting another similar ordeal might help to break our culture’s tech-trance. As reported by WPVI-TV, customers of the popular ShopRite grocery store chain were double-charged in May, 2022.
When one woman visited a store in Galloway, New Jersey, she recounted that, “She said, 'We did have a computer problem, but it seems to be okay now.'" The woman went on to say, “Then she came around and put the card in, and it worked," adding, "I didn't realize I had been double charged until I got home."
When the double-charged customer tried getting a refund, she, in her own words, “got the runaround.” As reported by the television station, “ShopRite told them it was their bank's problem. The bank told them it was ShopRite's problem.” According to another victim of the error, “[a ShopRite manager] admitted to me that there were literally thousands of people that had the same problem on that same day.”
My hope here is to have imparted a divergent view of computer technology that is seldom talked about. My words should not be taken to mean that I have overlooked the computer’s magical propensities and wondrous skillset, which aids mankind in much of its aims. Nor do I suggest that our culture hold back computer technology from the world.
I mean only that every technology carries with it consequences, whether this fact is grasped by culture or not. For one must keep in mind how errors in computer technology, internet, management mainframes, digital banking systems and even airline computer networks can come to afflict those who place their unquestioned faith in its functionality.
The point is that where general digital dependence is found, digital defects are sure to appear.
Neil Postman, Technopoloy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, P.114-115