Following the April disruption filed in 26-0406, and a confirmed 2025 incident affecting shared airport software, industry analysis has settled on a conclusion the sector has been circling for years: common-use platforms are a systemic single point of failure.
The Alternative Was Worse
It is worth resisting the obvious conclusion. Before common-use systems, each airline needed dedicated desks, dedicated hardware and dedicated staff at every airport it served. Terminal capacity was allocated by carrier, and a gate could sit empty while another airline queued.
Shared platforms are why a terminal can flex. They increased capacity, reduced cost and improved passenger experience, and no airport is going to unwind them because of an outage.
Concentration Risk Is A Choice With No Obvious Owner
The difficulty is that nobody in this arrangement is positioned to price the systemic risk. An individual airport evaluates its own contract. An airline evaluates its own operations. The supplier serves many customers and is not the party bearing the consequence of correlated failure.
The entity that would bear it — the travelling public, and the national economy behind a hub — is not a party to any of the contracts.
What Can Actually Be Done
Diversity is expensive and partly defeats the purpose. The practical levers are the unglamorous ones: enforced manual fallback that is exercised rather than documented, contractual transparency about the supplier’s own dependencies, and a regulator willing to treat a passenger-processing platform as critical infrastructure rather than as a procurement.
The last of those is the one that changes behaviour, and it is the one nobody has yet done.
This is an analysis file built on public reporting and industry commentary, listed below. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.