Every company in the world relies on technology to run their businesses and everyday senior executives go over the key data in terms of revenues, expenses and projections. Technology allows it to be ongoing and seamless until the system does not work. For every company in the world, a choice is made to do everything or close to everything inhouse or contract the work out. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but most companies choose to contract out some of the work. One of the disadvantages of contracting out the work is every once in a while, and everyone hopes that the once in the while is rare, something goes wrong. In the case of airline companies across the US, they use a service such as CrowdStrike to protect themselves from the cyber-attacks.

In an article by David Koenig of the Associated Press, CrowdStrike was doing a normal software upgrade, if you have a phone or personal computer, the companies offer regular updates, and they happen and life goes on. The problem was there was an error in the upgrade in the cyber security software affecting Microsoft operating systems which cause computers to go down.

Compounding the problem was for the airline industry, the technology issue happened on the busiest day of the holiday season with occupancy levels of planes at 90% and more. The software affected some of the older software programs which affected systems used to check in passengers, schedule crews, and make preflight calculations about aircraft weight and balance. The airlines could not offer solutions to passengers and had to cancel flights which compounds the problem till Delta Airlines total of flight cancellation reached 5,500, United Airlines total was 1,500. The good news was by the weekend or by Monday United’s total of cancelled flights was 19. American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Allegiant Air were back to normal by Monday.

Alaska Airlines and Southwest Airlines were not affected as they are not CrowdStrike customers.

Delta has offered waivers to make it easier for customers to rescheduled flights. In recent weeks, Delta Chief says company is facing $500 million in costs from the outage.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, with technology at some point there will be concerns, the system is not working, the issue is always what does the company do about it. Every year, the expectations for seamless service gets higher and higher and when things do not go perfect, people react to the system differently. Some can wait, some do not want to wait, and what does a company do for them? No days, people who do not like to wait, will post something on social media for good or bad and it may or may not be read by hundreds or thousands of people and will they change their buying of the service or product? We do not know but it could, so the issue is how does a company react? If you think they reacted well, then you can hold on the stock, if the company acts badly then it is good to find an alternative.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.