…it wasn’t going to work. Southern California air traffic control turned their back on the local boys and installed a bunch of servers from Redmond. Techworld has the not altogether unexpected tale of the result.

At least they were intelligent enough to know that you can’t count on Windows to run unassisted. They had an automatic shutdown cycle set up every 49.7 days, and made it a regular procedure to manually reboot the server every 30 days. Except they missed one manual cycle so when the self-defense shutdown happened, 800 planes were stranded in the air for three hours.

Anyone care to filk a new verse for “When Will They Ever Learn?”