In this particular case, I can't blame IT, unless they didn't warn Disney about this possibility.
For some time now Disney has insisted that
EVERYTHING go through one central data center in Florida and I do mean everything, including things like the signals for the trains at
Disneyland. Yes, you read that right, in order for the signals at Disneyland (in California) to work for the train, here is what happens:
- A train sets of the sensor in California
- The sensor sends a signal to the data center in Florida to tell it that the sensor has been tripped
- The data center in Florida processes the signal, then sends the appropriate signal to the appropriate light back in California
And you have no idea how much I wish I was making this up, but we found this out one day when we went to Disneyland and they couldn't scan tickets, either at the parking booth or turnstiles, run credit cards (they did run the manually, but only if you had an embossed card), accept gift cards or operate more than one train at a time (there were other things down as well, but this was the big one). When we asked about the trains, they said because the server was down they couldn't get the signal to determine if another train was in front of them and yes, that server was indeed in Florida.
Even the lights in California are controlled by this data center in Florida, if Janitorial has issues and needs to stay late at Plaza Inn for example, they have to call Florida to request the lights be turned on.
So if this data center goes down, it takes everything with it, thus establishing the possibility for a single point of failure, which I have to imagine IT warned Disney about when they said they wanted to run everything through a single data center. Given the nature of Disney all of this should have globally distributed redundancy and really the cost of doing so would be fairly minimal, especially compared to massive downtime.