Ah that seems interesting. Maybe a media thing - covering my flights than in reality?

That would probably be the Crowdstrike outage, just a little over a year ago. For that they used a similar list of airports, with the addition of CLE but without JFK.

They are working on this? Its not like these systems are something you just develop the new platform in isolation and one night you cut over. Its a multi year investment to figure out all the intricate ways these technologies have been entwined over the past 50 years, untangling those connections one by one to relink thatbprocess to a new backend and do that without breaking 20 other things that you didn’t realize relied on that connection you severed. Thats a process that takes years to work through and they’ve been actively working on ever since they announced United Next and will continue through the end of the decade.

I'm going to ask a potentially stupid question: why does weight and balance have to be handled by some centralized system rather than by each plane individually?

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...08884dca2c.jpg

This caused me to miss my flight to Singapore on SQ. I’m currently trapped in LAX on hold with reservations. Already losing one day of vacation out of this.

UA is atrocious and leaves me to rebook and deal with the aftermath of their screw up.

Need figure out what comp I’m due as this is costing me big with hotel, lost vacation time, etc. I’m UA gold which means nothing obviously.

UA is garbage airline and especially their employees.

Apart from that, how’s the trip going? 😉

Their IT department needs fired. How in the hell do you not have instant failover protection for this kind of issue.

I rarely fly UA anyways but they managed to screw me again.

They rebooked me and only one UA leg to Asia.

well….the AI might be. Flying back from SYD tomorrow. I didn’t know there was an issue when i was checking my flight status earlier today. When i checked the where is my plane coming from, the AI generated message said something about an issue “outside of United’s control.” Looks like the LLM has been properly fine tuned :)

It’s a real-time operational database which is not something you can order up on AWS. Designing and maintaining these systems is complex because most consistency algorithms take time to provide guarantees but delays cause the database to lag the operation.


Imagine 20 people editing the same Google Doc then one of them has a 10 second delay. Suddenly their vital edits show up which breaks someone else’s edits etc etc. Now the whole doc is broken until all the edits are resolved and everyone else is blocked waiting on the latest copy.

Since they offer codeshares out of JFK they usually include it. Here it was UA mainline only, so JFK was not affected

There are a number of exceptional failure states that would not trigger an automatic cutover to the backup, especially if they have not been envisioned by the people who designed the disaster recovery plan.

Well, you need to figure out what comp you want, not what you’re “due”. United is not going to pay for pre-paid hotel or lost vacation time. If your Singapore flight was on a separate ticket, I wouldn’t be expecting too much at all.

Wow that is awful United is not going to have to pay for those expenses when they are 100 percent at fault for this travel chaos. This reminds me of Delta's meltdown. Unhelpful employees as well at United. Another example of why consumers need more guaranteed protections from airlines.

It’s even worse. I’m seeing and hearing reports of agents trying to charge fare class change fees to those rebooking as a result of missed flights. Only the best United, only the best 🙄