This is not a big story, but I find it interesting. Last week American Airlines had its reservations computer system — called SABRE — go offline for most of a day leading to the cancellation of more than 700 flights. Details are still sketchy (here’s American’s video apology) but this is beginning to look like a classic example of a system that became too integrated and a company that was too dependent on a single technology.

To be clear, according to American the SABRE system did not itself fail, what failed was the airline’s access to its own system — a networking problem. And for further clarification, American no longer owns SABRE, […]