Delta Reminds Us Of The Importance Of Disaster Recovery

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If you are traveling today and your plans involve flying on Delta, the news out of Atlanta isn’t just bad, it could outright ruin your entire week or vacation. Because of a power outage, Delta is grounding thousands of flights and is warning that the impact could be felt for days as the company attempts to bring its service back online.

Starting at about 2:30AM ET, the company says a power outage knocked its computer system offline around the globe. While the company is not saying when the service will be back up and running to full capacity, they are offering waivers (change your flight with no penalty) between August 8 and August 12.

An outage of this scale is impacting thousands of travelers and is surely ruining business meetings and stopping travelers from reaching their vacation destination. For those who work in the IT sector, this is a hard reminder of the importance to plan for outages and more importantly, the ability to recover gracefully from down time.

What Delta is experiencing right now is about as bad as it gets for a company. They are losing revenue, their brand reputation is taking a hit and the outage has been on-going for several hours. What’s surprising here is that a company as large as Delta does not have geo-redundant replication of its datacenters to avoid power outages and other natural disasters so that today’s scenario could be circumvented.

If this event does nothing else, it will remind other companies that the time they invest in disaster recovery and building out geographic independent redundant data centers is worth its weight in gold when an outage arises. This afternoon, take a few minutes to look over your disaster recovery plans and make sure you will not follow Delta’s path in the event your home office loses power.