Commenting on the disruption, Professor Oli Buckley, an expert in cyber security at Loughborough University, explains why resilience, recovery and effective fallback arrangements are just as important as safety and reliability.
“It is important not to confuse this incident with a failure of aviation safety. Slowing air traffic when system confidence is reduced is the appropriate safety response.
“The more difficult question is one of resilience. Critical infrastructure shouldn’t just be designed to prevent known failures. It needs to be able to continue operating, perhaps at reduced capacity, when unexpected failures occur.
“Air travel is a particularly good example of how the consequences of a technical failure can last much longer than the failure itself. Fixing the computer doesn’t put the planes, pilots, cabin crew and passengers back where they were supposed to be. Once flights are cancelled or diverted, aircraft and crews are displaced, schedules are disrupted and airports and airlines have to untangle the knock-on effects across a highly interconnected network.
“We saw a similar pattern with the disruption experienced by M&S and Co-op last year. Those incidents were cyber-attacks, and there is no suggestion that this air traffic control failure was caused by a cyber-attack, so the causes are very different. What they have in common is what happens afterwards. A single disruption in one part of a complex organisation can ripple out into many others, and restoring the original system doesn’t immediately restore everything that depends upon it.
“That is an important part of resilience that is sometimes overlooked. We naturally focus on preventing systems from failing and on how quickly we can restore them. But we also need to ask how well we can contain the consequences when they do fail, how effectively fallback arrangements work, and how quickly the wider system can recover.
“It is too early to draw conclusions about precisely what failed or why. The important questions for the investigation will be what redundancy and fallback arrangements existed, how effectively they worked, and whether the system as a whole was sufficiently resilient to the failure of one of its components.”
ENDS
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