Southern California air-traffic systems were migrated from stable, Unix-based systems to commodity PCs running Microsoft Windows-based operating systems in the past three years. These systems required regular reboots — and when a tech failed to perform the reboot correctly, the systems died and wouldn't come back up, stranding 800 planes in the skies over Lalaland.
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.
(Thanks, Isara!)
