Southwest Airlines grounds flights due to computer outage

If it's any consolation, often in these sort of large scale outages at least part of the cause is management pushing back on recommendations by the IT staff.

More than likely outsourced, but probably not from places like IBM. I recall there was a rental car company that used Unisys systems and I believe all custom software.

I believe Southwest uses a system called SAAS, which they call "a Sabre Product" though it is actually based on the old Braniff Cowboy system and modified in-house. I remember talk of them switching to Sabre proper, but it's been years since I've been in that industry. Sabre I believe was made by some IBM engineers originally.

Some Relevant Links if you want to dig in, working with these systems was a lot of fun (I worked at several airlines):

Sabre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)

Global Distribution System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Sabre Company site: http://www.sabreairlinesolutions.com/home/

Usually they are a group of specialiced programs, systems and services like amadeus (reservations) , carmen( crew programing) , that have to be costumiced for each company.

I worked for Southwest as recently as last year.

In the industry, ALL reservation and ticketing systems are written by specialists. The major players are Sabre ( think IBM ) / Navitaire / ITA ( which was bought by Google not too long ago ). Southwest is a great company, and they pay well, but their engineering staff is made up of the neckbeard brigade . . . lots of guys in their 50s that have either retired before retiring, or finally decided to learn this new fangled "java" language and move on from C and COBOL. There is simply not the engineering skill, nor the organizational will, to develop anything that complex in house. They tried once about 5 years ago and after 4 months it exploded in a ball of flames because they couldn't solve the the throughput issue.

This outage was almost certainly a Sabre issue. The reservation system itself runs on old school IBM big iron written in C. The system is so damn old that when you go southwest.com, all the information retrieved is done via screen scraping. Not XML, not JSON, not even CORBA. The key point is when the spokesman describes the "weight" of the airplane, something that is calculated by the system according to how many people checked in, how much luggage, etc. Without the system up and running, the flight cannot be "closed" and therefore tracked properly.

Southwest hosts all of their own in house applications ( except for a few things on GCE ), but the Sabre system is run out of some nuclear proof bomb shelter in Tulsa. It goes down 1 ~ 2 a year, but typically it's only out for 10-15 minutes. For planes to be called back to the gate, the outage would have had to have been over 60 minutes, as that's how long they buffer in a separate system in case it does go down.

Finally, Southwest pays Sabre by . . . wait for it, requests executed per second.

Unable to calculate the weigh of the plane perhaps?

The business is probably so computer-dependent that the business is essentially the software systems executing. Planes flying, at this point, are mere physical side effects of software systems executing. If your systems aren't executing, your business isn't running.

Add in probable regulatory requirements that are also implemented by software, and that probably makes it illegal to fly.