Southwest Airlines: 'Shameful' Technical Debt Bites Back
DevOps.com, January 4th, 2023
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Last month's debacle of canceled flights was caused by decades of technical debt. That's the analysis of Columbia University professor Zeynep Tufekci.
Analysis: SWA needs a cloud burst
Although there were several contributing factors, a lack of scalability in a critical crew scheduling system led to days of near-total paralysis: In many cases, the staff were in the right place to fly and crew the planes, but the SkySolver system had no way of knowing that. Making things worse, manual fallbacks collapsed under the weight of the workload.