There’s an old saying that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The travel industry’s “slavish dependence” on technological wizardry for its every purpose is fuelling a complacency that may expose it to cyber terrorism, one leading tourism academic claims.
Crowdstrike’s impact on many aspects of our everyday lives, as evidenced last Friday, may even have been a macrocosm of a future instance whereby something as simple as human or IT error may expose the travel industry as utterly defenceless in the event of another outage.
The mass chaos caused by a single bug in a lone software update, whether or not it was caused by human error, demonstrated just how easily society can be brought to a total standstill.
As we all know, the failure caused widespread chaos for the aviation industry, grounding airlines around the world and delaying travellers as systems gradually came back online.
Some airlines were more widely impacted than others, but thankfully, Crowdstrike identified and implemented a fix to stop the damage getting worse.
University of Technology Sydney Adjunct Fellow David Beirman told travelBulletin that not only was he surprised an IT failure of this magnitude took so long to happen, but all the signs are there for it to happen again.
“There have been IT crashes in the past affecting individual airlines and telecommunications companies [such as] the recent Optus outage,” Beirman said.
“While all IT systems have various backups and protections, the events of the past few days demonstrate that they are far from invulnerable and there is a chance that it could happen again.”
Beirman’s travel CV dates back four decades to 1981 when he was a retail consultant with Jetset (now Helloworld) long before acronyms such as GDS and NDC took over the professional landscape.
In those days, agents would handwrite airfare tickets and receipts in triplicate, spending their days on the phone to airlines to confirm seats before issuing their clients with two of those copies – one for themselves and one for the airline – while retailing the third.
Call it old school, but Beirman believes even in the face of paperless offices and sustainability-minded agencies, modern travel agents should be aware of, if not fully trained, in manual processes in the event of another major IT outage.
“All frontline travel staff should at least be trained in booking by phone in the event of a future meltdown,” Beirman said.
Furthermore, large travel firms should have a backup operating system it can readily switch to in the event one breaks down. That said, it should be noted last week’s Crowdstrike outage affected less than 1% of all Microsoft systems worldwide – only around 8.5 million machines.
Governments can do more to put barriers in place to prevent another major outage snowballing into a major problem, such as legislating to require businesses to maintain a second operating system so their employees have automatic backups of their work instantly available – even by going guarantor on a zero-interest loan to fund the IT purchases.
It must be said however that Beirman’s comments come from an observational perspective – a highly educated one without question, but not one actively involved at the front line of retail travel.
For Travellers Choice Managing Director Christian Hunter, his nationwide network of member agencies were immediately impacted, with the outage forcing around 100 websites the company manages on behalf of its members to go offline. But thankfully, the problem was short-lived.
“What we were able to do was work with our IT provider to isolate where the issue was coming from and we were able to get all the websites back up and running very quickly and haven’t
noticed any impact since then,” Hunter told travelBulletin.
“There are obviously customers who have been impacted through flight delays and cancellations and they’re managing those.”
But the biggest plaudits came from Australian Travel Industry Association CEO, Dean Long, who had nothing but praise for agents and the way they faced their latest hurdle.
“A big shout-out to all our travel professionals out there who are doing what they can to support Australians in their travels, whether it’s getting away or getting home,” Long said.
Ultimately, last week’s Crowdstrike outage was a brief cyclone in a teacup, but even technological clouds can create stormy skies.
