What is more impressive is how rare these events are, given the complexity of the underlying systems. Redundancy is not without its own problems (source of truth, for instance).
https://www.ft.com/content/65544730-8216-11e4-b9d0-00144feab...
And that's just the UK. Airport systems crashing is a regular occurrence. Paris crashed due to still relying on a Windows 3.1 system:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-syst...
The IT is just poor. Tech firms routinely change much more massive and complex systems at a far faster pace compared to the stagnation found in airline IT, and yet total failures are not more frequent.
And then after a lot of angry words and finger pointing this new failure gets added to the failure model.
My personal takeaway after chasing the long tail of automatic failover on a few projects, is quite often it is better to drop a few 9's from your service goal, decouple some of the systems, and accept that while some parts of the system may go down, it should not bring everything down with it.
https://www.wprost.pl/amp/11364934/atak-na-polska-infrastruk...
It does seem that a lot of infrastructure that was put in place during a golden age cannot be adequately maintained, but AFAIK this seems to be the case in USA and Europe too.
NATs has reported that the system is now back up and running. It is possible that the secondary system took over with data syncing having to take place before the switchover?
My original post was about my interest in the technical aspects of redundancy and failover mechanisms in something as mission-critical as air traffic control.
I come from a background in broadcasting, where failover is critical, and redundancy is built into any broadcast chain. e have multiple backups and jumping-off points to deal with any issues that arise. It's pretty rare we could ever go to “black”.
