JetBlue Not Alone: 5 Other Critical I.T. Events

JetBlue’s problems in the past week, as cancellations left tens of thousands of passengers stranded and tarnished the carrier’s reputation, are still being tallied, but it’s clear the company lacked a system that could reassign personnel automatically. JetBlue’s awful performance put us in mind of some other events that challenged organizations to the core and exposed the frailties of their I.T. setups.

Here are five that spring to mind, plus related stories, from the archives of Baseline and CIO Insight.

Katrina: Crash Course in Disaster Recovery
A little more than a year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, we identified some lessons for future technology stewards when catastrophe hits.

Sept. 11: Focusing on Business Continuity Through a Tragedy
A detailed report, in the immediate wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, on the steps taken by bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald to keep operating even as it mourned the deaths of hundreds of its people.

The Blackout of 2003: Adding Up the Numbers
The loss of electrical power for 50 million U.S. and Canadian customers was a jarring reminder that single points of failure have no place in a modern world.

Salesforce.com’s Service Outage: Sorry, But Your Computers Have Stopped Working
A tricky database problem, among other things, led to costly hours of downtime and a crisis for this CRM vendor. Salesforce solved the problem by rewriting its software and adding redundant data centers.

Identity Theft at ChiocePoint: When You Don’t Know Who’s Exposed
It was bad enough that this data broker got fooled into selling private information to Nigerian criminals. What made it worse is that the company didn’t know how many of the 17 billion records it stored had inaccuracies. A cautionary tale.

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