The Delta Air Lines outage cost the company $500 million by the company’s calculations, but the air carrier’s continuing public squabbling with their vendors and the government may cost Delta much more.  In fact, the aftermath of the outage is serving as a textbook example of reputational damage to a company as a result of IT availability failure.   

Reputational damage occurs when the Secretary of Transportation reads mean tweets about your company,  when news headlines accuse your company of having “ancient tech”,  and your top vendors publicly accuse you of making public comments that are “incomplete, false, and misleading.”

News about the outage, which began on July 19th, was still breaking on August 8th, with word of a class action lawsuit against the airline by impacted customers.  It is a continuing daily drip of negativity for Delta, which would have been preventable with the proper IT plan and execution.

This is what reputational damage looks like.  The story continues to linger, generating headlines and dragging the company’s image down among people who would have forgotten about their failures by now. 

Even with downtime, your organization is likely to not generate the widespread media attention that Delta has been subject to.  But your customers will know, your prospects will hear about it, and you’ll suffer the consequences for a much longer period of time than the the outage itself. 

The best way to avoid the reputational damage of an outage is to avoid downtime in the first place.    Strategies to maximize the avoidance of an outage can be found in the Direct LTx whitepaper Maintaining High Availability:  Nine Critical Steps to Take for Disaster Recovery Success.   Click here to read the whitepaper.