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Speaker 1: Right now. It turns out those queues out the door

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Speaker 1: at Auckland the airport this morning were caused by an

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Speaker 1: issue with a switch. For several hours this morning, some

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Speaker 1: airlines had to check in customers manually because they couldn't

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Speaker 1: get the internet to work in twenty twenty four, leading

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Speaker 1: to flights being delayed a lot of disruption. Chloe Sarage's

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Speaker 1: Aucland Airport's COO, Chief operating Officer. She's withving tonight. Good evening, Hi, Eran,

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Speaker 1: thanks for having me Chloe. Who flicked the switch or

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Speaker 1: didn't flip the switch?

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Speaker 2: Listen? Can I just say first up, you know it

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Speaker 2: has been a challenging day for travelers, so I just

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Speaker 2: want to thank everybody who was traveling in and out

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Speaker 2: today for their patients. You know, nobody wants their travel

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Speaker 2: plans disrupted, so we just appreciated that. Now we've got

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Speaker 2: a little bit more information on what created the fault.

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Speaker 2: If you can give me a minute, I'll try and

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Speaker 2: explain it very simply. I'm not a tech person, but

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Speaker 2: basically what happens is we've got a fiber network, like

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Speaker 2: every other place, plugs into communication switches, multiple of them.

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Speaker 2: It connects into network providers and that's what all the

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Speaker 2: businesses operate on at the airport. So today, when things happened,

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Speaker 2: as tech teams do, they work through the elimination process,

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Speaker 2: isolated the fault to a particular communication switch and that

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Speaker 2: was in the domain of one of the network providers.

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Speaker 2: So what happens ryan when that occurred this morning. That

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Speaker 2: cuts internet access to the customers operating from that device,

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Speaker 2: as you pointed out, and that impacted a lot of businesses,

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Speaker 2: including the check and provider. So the fix was to

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Speaker 2: work with the external network providers. The tech teams disabled

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Speaker 2: the network connection and then they changed to a different

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Speaker 2: internet provider and that brought everything back online. So that's

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Speaker 2: kind of it in a nutshell.

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Speaker 1: And you don't know how this switch flicked.

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Speaker 2: No, it's more complicated than I can explain a little bit.

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Speaker 2: But it's something to do with v NAN. But that's

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Speaker 2: so not It wasn't like it in the switch.

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Speaker 1: Right, So it's not like someone physically flicked the switch. No,

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Speaker 1: there's some kind of computer program that has done of

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Speaker 1: its own volition.

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

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Speaker 1: Is it a worry that there is one switch that

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Speaker 1: can do this. I mean, how many passengers affected today?

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Speaker 2: And there are multiple switches ultimately and this, Yeah, you're right,

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Speaker 2: you know there are. I'm not sure how many of

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Speaker 2: these switches were faulty, but that does cause disruption, as

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Speaker 2: you've pointed out. And so today we probably had about

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Speaker 2: forty airlines running on delays departures, and then as that

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Speaker 2: kind of has a knock on effect, probably about twenty

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Speaker 2: arriving flights slightly delayed as well.

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Speaker 1: I mean that's pretty major. Alex is just testing into

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Speaker 1: the show. Why does the airport not have a fully

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Speaker 1: redundant ring network? That makes this makes no sense at

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Speaker 1: all in this day and age.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and listen, I appreciate all the questions. I'm probably

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Speaker 2: not quite the right person to answer the very technical things,

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Speaker 2: but what I can say from this is obviously we

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Speaker 2: will be learning from it also our external network providers

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Speaker 2: and other providers as well. So we're going to take

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Speaker 2: this away and have a look at what redundancies can

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Speaker 2: be put in place.

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Speaker 1: Right, are other airports at vulnerable like this or is

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Speaker 1: it just Auckland Airport that seems to have switches and

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Speaker 1: it can be flicked and planes are nutable to land.

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Speaker 2: Well, I think airports are pretty complex places. Generally they've

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Speaker 2: got a lot of local networks and then they've got

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Speaker 2: the external providers and they are multiple businesses joined up,

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Speaker 2: so they're pretty complex.

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Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: I can't comment on any other airports of course, and

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Speaker 2: their level of resilience, but generally, you know, airports would

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Speaker 2: all have the same, you know, types of types of questions.

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Speaker 1: I suppose, all right, good luck with that. Close sounds complicated.

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Speaker 1: Closed serage is the Auckland Airport COO. For more from

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Speaker 1: Heather Duplessy Alan Drive, listen live to news talks. It'd

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