37 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
# A small mistake does not a complex systems failure make
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- **期号**: SRE Weekly Issue #356（2023-01-22）
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- **作者**: Lorin Hochstein
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- **链接**: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/01/15/a-small-mistake-does-not-a-complex-systems-failure-make/
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## 简介
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This one succinctly sums up why I haven’t covered the NOTAM outage much yet.
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> If a small mistake was sufficient to take down a complex system, then our systems would be crashing all of the time.
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## 正文
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I’ve been trying to take a break from Twitter lately, but today I popped back in, only to be trolled by a [colleague of mine](https://www.bmt-online.org/):
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Here’s a [quote from the story](https://www.rawstory.com/faa-outage-cause/):
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The source of the problem was reportedly a single engineer who made a small mistake with a file transfer.
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Here’s what I’d like you to ponder, dear reader. Think about all of the small mistakes that happen every single day, at every workplace, on the face of the planet. If a small mistake was sufficient to take down a complex system, then ***our* *systems would be crashing all of the time.*** And, yet, that clearly isn’t the case. For example, before this event, when was the last time the FAA suffered a catastrophic outage?
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Now, it might be the case that no FAA employees have ever made a small mistake until now. Or, more likely, the FAA system works in such a way that small mistakes are not typically sufficient for taking down the entire system.
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To understand this failure mode, you need to understand how it is that the FAA system is able to stay up and running on a day-to-day basis, despite the system being populated by fallible human beings who are capable of making small mistakes. You need to understand ***how the system actually works*** in order to make sense of how a large-scale failure can happen.
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Now, I’ve never worked in the aviation industry, and consequently I don’t have domain knowledge about the FAA system. But I can tell you one thing: ***a small mistake with a file transfer*** is a hopelessly incomplete explanation for how the FAA system actually failed.
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Looks like “make” in the title of the post is in the wrong place.
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Other than that it reminds me of what a senior engineer constantly told me.
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“You’d be amazed how much things work when they are just left alone.”
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I’d be more interested in WHY an engineer is transferring files in the first place. That is where the problem lies.
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