Mobile apps or a web portal absolutely could have helped, simply by massively increasing the throughput of crew members being able to report that they didn't ma

Mobile apps or a web portal absolutely could have helped, simply by massively increasing the throughput of crew members being able to report that they didn't make it to their assigned location. Which could have stopped the cascading effect much sooner. The manual "reporting/fixing" of issues, which was done over the phone, includes pilots and crew members reporting "hey, I didn't actually get on the flight I was scheduled to". If the system did not receive that message, it was built to assume that the crew members made it to their next location and would be available for their next scheduled flight. But once a certain threshold of flights got canceled because of the storm, the limiting factor became how quickly staff members could even report that they didn't make it to their next location - they'd stay on hold for hours, until their next flight in their next city was scheduled to leave, and the system would still assume they were on that flight because it hadn't yet heard otherwise. Lack of webapps certainly wasn't the only issue here - as the article notes, their whole point-to-point scheduling model is more vulnerable to cascading failure as well, vs. a hub-and-spoke model. But the phone-based system did certainly cause a feedback loop that kept the disruption happening for much longer than it should have. And moving away from point-to-point would have many more tradeoffs/downsides for consumers than simply modernizing their tech system.