A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.
Too bad the whole story is nonsense.
But how could that be? It’s widely reported by reputable news websites all over the world, shared on social media like a strain of the common cold, and nobody seems to question it or doubt the veracity of the story. It seems that Southwest Airlines running on an operating system from 1992 is a perfectly believable story to just about everyone, so nobody is questioning it or wondering if it’s actually true. Well, I did, and no, it’s not true.
Let’s start with the actual source of the claim that Southwest Airlines was unaffected by CrowdStrike because they’re still using Windows 3.11 for large parts of their primary systems. This claim is easily traced back to its origin – a tweet by someone called Artem Russakovskii, stating that “the reason Southwest is not affected is because they still run on Windows 3.1”. This tweet formed the basis for virtually all of the stories, but it contains no sources, no links, no background information, nothing. It was literally just this one line.
It turned out be a troll tweet. A reply to the tweet by Russakovskii a day later made that very lear: “To be clear, I was trolling last night, but it turned out to be true. Some Southwest systems apparently do run Windows 3.1. lol.” However, that linked article doesn’t cite any sources either, so we’re right back where we started. After quite a bit of digging – that is, clicking a few links and like 3 minutes of searching online – following the various reference and links back to their sources, I managed to find where all these stories actually come from to arrive at the root claim that spawned all these other claims.
It’s from an article by The Dallas Morning News, titled “What’s the problem with Southwest Airlines scheduling system?” At the end of last year, Southwest Airlines’ scheduling system had a major meltdown, leading to a lot of cancelled flights and stranded travelers just around the Christmas holidays. Of course, the media wanted to know what caused it, and that’s where this The Dallas Morning News article comes from. In it, we find the paragraphs that started the story that Southwest Airlines is still using Windows 3.1 (and Windows 95!):
Southwest uses internally built and maintained systems called SkySolver and Crew Web Access for pilots and flight attendants. They can sign on to those systems to pick flights and then make changes when flights are canceled or delayed or when there is an illness.
“Southwest has generated systems internally themselves instead of using more standard programs that others have used,” Montgomery said. “Some systems even look historic like they were designed on Windows 95.”
SkySolver and Crew Web Access are both available as mobile apps, but those systems often break down during even mild weather events, and employees end up making phone calls to Southwest’s crew scheduling help desk to find better routes. During periods of heavy operational trouble, the system gets bogged down with too much demand.
↫ Kyle Arnold at The Dallas Morning News
That’s it. That’s where all these stories can trace their origin to. These few paragraphs do not say that Southwest is still using ancient Windows versions; it just states that the systems they developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look “historic like they were designed on Windows 95”. The fact that they are also available as mobile applications should further make it clear that no, these applications are not running on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Southwest pilots and cabin crews are definitely not carrying around pocket laptops from the ’90s.
These paragraphs were then misread, misunderstood, and mangled in a game of social media and bad reporting telephone, and here we are. The fact that nobody seems to have taken the time to click through a few links to find the supposed source of these claims, instead focusing on cashing in on the clicks and rage these stories would illicit, is a rather damning indictment of the state of online (tech) media. Many of the websites reporting on these stories are part of giant media conglomerates, have a massive number of paid staff, and they’re being outdone by a dude in the Arctic with a small Patreon, minimal journalism training, and some common sense.
This story wasn’t hard to debunk – a few clicks and a few minutes of online searching is all it took. Ask yourself – why do these massive news websites not even perform the bare minimum?
No, they are not, that’s why I am against funding news sites with a “server tax” or any kind of levy (whether we are talking about local news websites or not). Simply put, they are no better than the blogs they claim to be superior to.
Good news websites that run original well-researched stories such as WSJ have no problem charging money for access to those stories. The other kind of news websites, the blog-in-denial kind, can have their lunch eaten by blogs, nothing of value will be lost.
I previously worked in the travel sector (IT). Nearly 80% of UK and an equivalent number of EU package holiday bookings still use a system called Viewdata. Basically the same tech that you used to use to get the TV guide on your CRT television. Tech that is 50 years old.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewdata
The service is still booking £bns every single day.
I suspect if you were to dig a little deeper you might find things older than windows 3.1 floating around in the aviation industry
Seems to me that viewdata has proven itself reliable. When something truly better gets around it will get adopted. Until then, maintaining the lowest energy state seems like a solid strategy.
It’s the classic of trying to get international agreement on a new standard. It’s a nightmare. Viewdata has survived because while everyone agrees it’s old and lacking in Many areas, no one agrees on what should replace it (and effectively control billions of £€$ interactions). I expect it will end up outlubing me…
A lot of banks still use (or at least used to) IBM terminal emulators to connect to their systems
The “SABRE” system dates from 1960.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_system)
You’re basically castigating people for click/rage-baiting because they passed a story on without appropriate evidence. How is this post not exactly the same sort of thing? You have no evidence beyond a *lack* of evidence. Having an app doesn’t invalidate the claim. If they had some way of making Windows 3.1 work on modern hardware, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that good programmers could interface with an app. If you’d just said that there’s no evidence and here’s some evidence that casts doubt, great, but your headline and article act as if you’ve got iron-clad proof that the original story is untrue. And nothing you’ve shown does that. It seems like more click-bait.
“You have no evidence beyond a *lack* of evidence.”
I mean, Thom cites sources for one, and gives examples directly from the articles. Before you make this accusation, maybe bring examples or receipts?
Otherwise, your analysis is just as faulty comment bait as what you’re complaining about.
I don’t dispute that the other articles may be doing what he’s stating. My only beef is that he doesn’t cite a source that actually contradicts the report. It appears to me that he essentially assumes an article is the source, then infers from a quote that it must not be reliant on Windows 3.1 because there’s an app. That seems pretty shaky.
To be fair, I am **extremely** skeptical of the Windows 3.1 story, too, and he’s probably entirely correct about what happened as far as the news (the lack of a clean source is the most convincing part of this article, but again, I think you should just say that only). I thought it was a joke/satire initially, then was surprised to see major news sources reporting on it. I too have looked for a reliable source confirming or denying it (not as much as Thom, but probably why the algorithms brought me here, where I was disappointed by his evidence, and said so). It seems incredible (as in, not credible) to me that anyone would still be using Windows 3.1 for anything as important as this.
Anyway, I hold no ill-will. Best to you both.
sirjake,
The onus must be on the person making the claim to provide evidence by default. Without evidence, being skeptical is justified by default. Of course maybe a paper could dig further, but if nothing turns up the claim that southwest runs on windows 3.1 should be ignored..
The reason for this is simple: from an integrity standpoint if every claim had to be taken seriously by default despite zero evidence backing it, then the flood gates for misinformation are wide open and would subject the entire news industry to rampant abuse. The responsibility lies on real journalists to check facts and verify sources before publishing. Failure to do this used to bring shame to a publication, forced them to print retractions, and maybe even fire the reporters who lied. Granted these standards are laughable today. Clickbait articles have won out over truthful ones. Fox news shows us just how little the truth matters. They cross the lines on libel, but still it shows the demand for misinformation can be as great as the demand for truth. Integrity lost, moreover journalists are a dying breed.
That’s actually a pretty decent argument, but not the one being made in the article. He says he debunked it, but I don’t see that as being the case.
Sadly, they created the demand for misinformation to be higher than regular information (they create triggering headlines, hate and negative news sell better to our brains than regular news). And obviously misinformation is easy to create, you don’t have to check anything.
> You have no evidence beyond a *lack* of evidence.
(Extraordinary) claims require (extraordinary) evidence. That means that the onus is on the news-sites reporting this urban legend, not on those pointing out the lack of evidence.
As I said to Alfman above, I actually do think that’s a good argument, but it’s not what was presented in the article.
Honestly, I’d not even care if it was true. If all security holes were patched and the application was happily and stably running in its environment, so be it.
I am quite sick of everything under the sun requiring multiple gigabytes of RAM to run and being… so… freaking… slow…
My HP 712 with nextstep and 128MB of RAM loads office applications and email faster than my 64GB RAM Mac Pro. It also feels much faster during use in terms of responsiveness. So, really…
Our poor planet doesn’t need us tossing working equipment in the trash every 6 months.
Shiunbird,
I don’t necessarily care what they’re running either as long as it’s secure obviously.
Many of them are actually running mainframe systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Airline_Reservations_System
I don’t remember where but I saw an interesting documentary about how airlines are able to book multileg flights on each other’s services. Airlines build front ends for this system but sometimes employees need to use specialized functions that are still keyed into the mainframe directly.
I’m pretty sure all of the “magic” happens on the back end and the front end is just a terminal interface whether it be green screen or even HTML.
This is how I understand it to work as well, it’s all terminals and all the frontends just talk to the terminal.
Which is why it’s sometimes possible to do a ‘little bobby tables’ (XKCD 327).
Lennie,
That’s a good one.
I don’t follow XKCD at all, but I wonder if there’s one that covers Crowdstrike, with everyone consolidating technology & vendors to a single point of failure. “I hope you’ve learned to diversity…”
I think most useful when it comes to crowdstrike is to have one of the previously most popular banana (all you have right now is not just 1 species, it’s 1 banana, every time the same DNA, it’s all cloning) and monocultures…