Mysterious “Computer Glitches” strike again

This week there are a couple scary headlines that affected millions of people, all of which were blamed on the infamous “computer glitches.”

• FAA Computer Glitch Causes Flight Delays - read full article
• United Airlines suffers computer glitch - ZDNET Blog

I don’t know the specifics of these “glitches” but I suspect you really can’t blame the computers. A couple of decades of working with computers tells me that computers are pretty binary. They either work or they don’t, and which way it goes depends exactly on what you tell it to do. Now, no IT professional is going to tell a computer on purpose to wipe out the airline industry for a few hours or any other business, but it happens all the time. Why? They lacked the timely information to help them get sufficiently ahead of the problem.

4 comments June 20th, 2007 javier