It’s a few days late, but I wanted to comment on the recent news about UAL Corporation, parent of United Airlines, almost being run into the ground at the hands of a bunch of automated computer systems. Slashdot has some good commentary (deliciously titled Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B), but the summary at the Wall Street Journal (cached since they seem to have truncated it now?) seems to explain it well. Additionally, Google has posted some behind-the-scenes info on the subject.
Basically an article on a newspaper website was somehow placed on it’s “latest business news” section. Google’s automated news crawler detected that a new link was on that page, and so indexed the page. The article in question was an undated article from 2002 detailing United Airlines’ bankruptcy filings. Once Google had indexed the article, people who had Google Alerts set up for United Airlines started getting messages, and it started filtering throughout the internet. The way I understand it is that people then started trading the stock, which eventually brough automated stock trading programs in on the action. End result? UAL dropped from $12.50 a share to $3 before trading was halted and real people started straightening things out.
I don’t know what it is, but I find this fascinating, horrible, and awesome. Maybe it’s my intense hatred for the airline industry in general. The thought that a freak oversight somewhere (and I think reports have started to say it was an error on the newspaper site that the original article was undated) can potentially drive a mega-corporation into the ground blows my mind. It’s crazy to think about how the world has become so automated and interconnected that something like this would happend in the first place!
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