The Importance of Reliable Digital Signage
At Heathrow Terminal 5, screens are still down from the CrowdStrike outage. The incident highlights how mission-critical digital signage has become and the difficulty of sending engineers airside for manual fixes. It reinforces the importance of reliable, remotely managed networks. The creative responses to this outage have been entertaining, at least.
Key Takeaways
- Digital signage systems are mission-critical and affect user experience significantly
- A reliable, remotely managed network is essential to minimise disruption
- Creative responses to technical issues can help lighten the mood and engage audiences
Topics
- Digital Transformation
- Technology
- User Experience
Transcript
So if you look at the analytics on all my LinkedIn posts, you'll see that Error Message of the Week is in fact the most popular. So there I am, pouring my heart out about digital signage strategy and all you want to see is public fail. Who am I to deny my audience? So here we are at Heathrow Terminal 5 and as you can see, the screens behind me in the BA lounge are still out from the CrowdStrike outage we've had earlier this year. And one of the things I was worried about doing Error Message of the Week was the sort of schadenfreude. I'm not going to pile in on them because to be honest, we've done equally bad things, it's just we're not big enough to be a global news story. And I think it is a bit wrong to do too much hand-wringing over these things. But it certainly throws up a few interesting things. The actual patch of the fix I believe has gone out already, I think went out quite quickly. But because it involves manual intervention, it just highlights how much effort it is if there is a problem sending engineers out, especially airside to fix screens. It is super difficult. So it's actually highlighted a super important problem. In startup folklore, there's this thing which if you want to know how mission critical your product is, turn it off for a day and see what happens. Well, I think, you know, unfortunately, this did cause a huge amount of chaos and a lot of people were affected in their travel, finance, etc. And we'll include some examples of that on the video edit. But it really does show that actually screens are pretty mission critical and people couldn't really achieve what they wanted to when all of those screens went down. It also shows the importance of a reliable network that can be remotely managed without having to have engineering talent out on the ground. What's also been quite interesting is actually all the creative and fun ways people have played with this one. And we'll sort of lighten the mood a bit by including a few of them. Right. Well,