United Airlines Outages: Can IT Automation Prevent Catastrophes?

IT Automation can protect organizations against many common IT problems and prevent disasters during system shutdowns such as the United Airlines outages.

Written by . Last Updated:
US Airlines outage could have been prevented by IT automation

Earlier this month we published a blog post in regards to the U.S. Customs Outage. A nationwide system shutdown held up travelers across the United States, filling up airports with frustrated fliers who were unable to get where they were going due to these issues caused by a technical glitch.  We also linked to a blog post we published last year, when the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines both experienced outages in the same day. We recommended that organizations “predict the unpredictable” by implementing an IT automation solution to protect them from potential technical flops. This blog post proved to be predictive in itself when this past Monday, United Airlines experienced yet another “IT issue” which forced them to cancel a dozen flights and delay many others—the outage in all affected over 200 flights.

While we don’t know what directly caused these outages, an IT automation solution can provide a degree of protection against many common IT problems, provided it includes features like simplified workflow creation, Change Management, reliable high availability, and others. Check out our previous blog post to learn more about how IT automation can protect organizations during outages caused by technical glitches:

Caroline Boyland was a contributor to IT Automation Without Boundaries, covering workload automation, data center automation, cloud management, and more.