NATS ATC issue
While air traffic was certainly curtailed on Friday 12th December 2014, our network traffc certainly picked up.
NATS technical systems were having a hard time, and the traffic to their website which we host on a highly available solution (with multiple redundancies) really picked up, with traffic jumping approximately 20x the normal rate.
We’re delighted to say that their websites – which we’ve worked in close collaboration with them on to fine-tune for performance and availability – held up admirably despite the spike in traffic.
In fact, the only thing that struggled was our backend software rendering a real-time graphical visualisation of the incoming traffic.
We do feel sympathy for NATS in their technical software running the ATC – not code we’d like to be responsible for, and certainly feel the pain of travellers both here and abroad, but offer congratulations to their Corporate Communications team for running their side of things without hiccups despite the intensity no doubt present at their CTC.