Originally Posted by LEONIDES

Smells fishy. I really doubt that a single router caused this mess. One has to believe that they have multiple redundancies built into their network, so if one piece of networking equipment - a router, hub, switch, or some other piece networking equipment - failed, a redundant piece of hardware would pick up the slack. Yes, there would be some degradation of service, but not a complete shutdown. This is standard practice today, in all modern data centers, like the ones United presumably uses.

One has to believe....

Then again, it is entirely possible that they do not have the necessary redundancies, and that they actually do have a single point of failure (SPOF) somewhere in their architecture. If that is the case, then someone needs to pay for this debacle with their job. We live in an era of dirt-cheap computer hardware and infrastructure; much of it can be leased or rented for a fraction of what it would have cost ten years ago. So a SPOF today is utterly inexcusable. Whoever is responsible for that SPOF has cost the company a whole lot of money - more than the cost of a duplicate router.

Of course, it is also possible that the infrastructure techs new about the SPOF, reported it, came up with a plan to fix it - and it was shot down, for budgetary or political reasons. If that happened, then someone in middle or senior management needs to resign. Tonight.