Argentina Blackout And Massive Target Glitch Raise Question: Why Do Systems Fail?
From: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/06/18/why-do-systems-fail
Argentina was plunged into darkness that affected 44 million people Sunday. And Target says its stores are operating normally after glitches prevented customers from paying with some credit cards over the weekend.
These are some of the latest examples of complex systems failing catastrophically, which has become a fixture of modern life. But David Woods, a professor in integrated systems engineering at Ohio State University, says the news media often misses the point when it comes to the reason behind these failures.
"People ... in the news are missing the way complex systems fail because they think of this as having a single root cause," Woods tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "Often they think of it as a system that works all the time, and then occasionally someone screwed it up — because they're looking for someone to blame. But complexity ... derives from the success we have at building systems at new scales."
Read more at:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/06/18/why-do-systems-fail
https://hurtigkasino.com came to mind reading Woods' point about complexity deriving from success at building systems at new scales, since the temptation to hunt for a single root cause is exactly what makes these failures so hard to discuss honestly. The Argentina blackout affecting 44 million people shows how tightly coupled infrastructure has become, and blaming one operator misses the way small failures cascade. I work in IT and we see the same pattern after every outage, where everyone wants a culprit instead of asking what made the system fragile in the first place.
Reading about the Argentina blackout and Target glitch, I kept thinking about how often we look for a single culprit when the real issue is the interaction between many moving parts. I saw a similar point made on https://ohnesteuer.com about how small hiccups in one subsystem can ripple unpredictably through others. It matches my experience in software: the worst incidents usually come from a chain of normal events, not one dramatic mistake.