The US Customs and Border computer malfunction at LAX on Saturday was blamed on a hardware fault. Once the fault occurred, the back-up system didn't immediately takeover, and once it did, surprise, surprise, the back-up system lacked needed capacity.
US Customs said that 17,398 passengers on 73 flights were affected. So, I guess that the "over 20,000 passengers affected" count given out by Customs yesterday was an over-estimate, while the 11,000 passenger number put out by LAX management was an undercount. I think LAX management may want to go back and see how they missed 6,000 incoming passengers.
The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, reportedly called for - what else - but an investigation into what happened, and said that he was working with Customs officials to prevent another such a failure, which Villaraigosa called "troubling and unacceptable."
Wonder how the mayor plans to prevent computer systems from malfunctioning, or their back ups from being inadequately scaled. I think we would all like to know.
It is bad enough that US Customs did a poor job of systems design and contingency management, but may we all be saved from politicians who think they are instant computer system experts.
