Chloe Surridge: Auckland Airport chief operating officer on the technology outage that delayed travellers

Auckland Airport has unveiled the scale of the delays today following an IT issue.

A fault with a fibre network provider's domains cut the internet to a number of businesses, including international check-ins.

It meant airlines had to manually check people in, causing several flights to be delayed.

The airport's chief operating officer, Chloe Surridge, says it caused a lot of disruption, until switching providers fixed the issue.

"There were 40 airlines running on delays in departures - and that kinda has a knock-on effect to probably about 20 arriving slightly delayed as well."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right now. It turns out those queues out the door
at Auckland the airport this morning were caused by an
issue with a switch. For several hours this morning, some
airlines had to check in customers manually because they couldn't
get the internet to work in twenty twenty four, leading
to flights being delayed a lot of disruption. Chloe Sarage's
Aucland Airport's COO, Chief operating Officer. She's withving tonight. Good evening, Hi, Eran,

(00:22):
thanks for having me Chloe. Who flicked the switch or
didn't flip the switch?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Listen? Can I just say first up, you know it
has been a challenging day for travelers, so I just
want to thank everybody who was traveling in and out
today for their patients. You know, nobody wants their travel
plans disrupted, so we just appreciated that. Now we've got
a little bit more information on what created the fault.
If you can give me a minute, I'll try and
explain it very simply. I'm not a tech person, but

(00:49):
basically what happens is we've got a fiber network, like
every other place, plugs into communication switches, multiple of them.
It connects into network providers and that's what all the
businesses operate on at the airport. So today, when things happened,
as tech teams do, they work through the elimination process,
isolated the fault to a particular communication switch and that

(01:12):
was in the domain of one of the network providers.
So what happens ryan when that occurred this morning. That
cuts internet access to the customers operating from that device,
as you pointed out, and that impacted a lot of businesses,
including the check and provider. So the fix was to
work with the external network providers. The tech teams disabled

(01:34):
the network connection and then they changed to a different
internet provider and that brought everything back online. So that's
kind of it in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
And you don't know how this switch flicked.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
No, it's more complicated than I can explain a little bit.
But it's something to do with v NAN. But that's
so not It wasn't like it in the switch.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Right, So it's not like someone physically flicked the switch. No,
there's some kind of computer program that has done of
its own volition.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, that's right, it's a fault within the switches I understandard.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Is it a worry that there is one switch that
can do this. I mean, how many passengers affected today?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
And there are multiple switches ultimately and this, Yeah, you're right,
you know there are. I'm not sure how many of
these switches were faulty, but that does cause disruption, as
you've pointed out. And so today we probably had about
forty airlines running on delays departures, and then as that
kind of has a knock on effect, probably about twenty

(02:36):
arriving flights slightly delayed as well.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
I mean that's pretty major. Alex is just testing into
the show. Why does the airport not have a fully
redundant ring network? That makes this makes no sense at
all in this day and age.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, and listen, I appreciate all the questions. I'm probably
not quite the right person to answer the very technical things,
but what I can say from this is obviously we
will be learning from it also our external network providers
and other providers as well. So we're going to take
this away and have a look at what redundancies can
be put in place.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Right, are other airports at vulnerable like this or is
it just Auckland Airport that seems to have switches and
it can be flicked and planes are nutable to land.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, I think airports are pretty complex places. Generally they've
got a lot of local networks and then they've got
the external providers and they are multiple businesses joined up,
so they're pretty complex.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
I can't comment on any other airports of course, and
their level of resilience, but generally, you know, airports would
all have the same, you know, types of types of questions.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
I suppose, all right, good luck with that. Close sounds complicated.
Closed serage is the Auckland Airport COO. For more from
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