By now you've probably heard about the outage at Hartsfield yesterday. Thousands of people were stranded not only in Atlanta but around the country. Arguably an outage big enough to briefly affect our economy similar to that incident started by not-so-smart Michael Lasseter at Hartsfield back in 2001. 

Anyway, as soon as I heard the story on WSB radio about this outage yesterday I knew people would blame it on a "computer glitch". Sure enough, they did! That "glitch" was apparently a "router that shut down a key computer" - whatever that means. 

Interestingly I've found over the years that, by and large, computers do what you tell them to do. It's that simple. Sure computers have mechanical and electronic failures but, still, they're just dumb machines waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It's very easy for the FAA and the media to blame inanimate objects like computers (or routers) when there's someone somewhere who failed to do the right thing. I'm confident that if you looked at the root cause of this outage, it'd highlight the failure to plan, improper change management (like in the recent ChoicePoint outage), or someone not buying into the value of redundancy and recovery technologies. I guarantee you that's the case.

Just like there are no accidents, there are no "computer glitches"...okay, maybe if you're running Windows Vista, but I digress.