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IT Crash Causes British Airways To Cancel All Flights (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
British Airways canceled all flights from London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Saturday as a global IT failure upended the travel plans of tens of thousands of people on a busy U.K. holiday weekend. The airline said it was suffering a "major IT systems failure" around the world. Chief executive Alex Cruz said "we believe the root cause was a power-supply issue and we have no evidence of any cyberattack." He said the crash had affected "all of our check-in and operational systems." BA operates hundreds of flights from the two London airports on a typical day -- and both are major hubs for worldwide travel. Several hours after problems began cropping up Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6 p.m. because the two airports had become severely congested. The airline later scrapped flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of the day.
So a power supply failure can bring down all operations on a global scale. Good to know that BA had outsourced part of their IT staff to India!!!
I didn't realized that the British celebrated U.S. Memorial Day weekend.
MBA to board: I've got a great idea to cut costs! It will save millions!
Somewhere, there is probably an IT guy who has been begging for the budget to upgrade some old machines, or move the services onto a cloud provider and was ignored.
He's crying today, because this huge revenue loss could probably have been avoided with a small budget for newer hardware or more redundancy.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Here you have the BBC report on the matter: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-400...
The Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975. In a very detailed way, it described how common business-planning stategies fail when applied to information technology projects. But did anyone listen? We've known how to avoid these sorts of problems for over 40 years!
and the backup plan for when the IT systems fail is: water and food vouchers..
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It's my vague recollection that at least one other airline had a power-related IT outage within the last year or so.
I would have thought "reliable power at scale" was a solved problem.
...the outsourced IT guys from TCS in India need to fly to the UK to fix the 'power supply' issue but currently they are unable to book a flight on British Airways.....
Please note that this is just flights out of Gatwick and Heathrow airports in London, not all BA flights. There will be knock-on effects elsewhere as those are both major hubs for BA, but many BA flights aren't effected.
Of course, it requires more than the myopic 3-month planning that most MBAs are capable of at maximum. It also requires a real understanding of risk management and staying away from all short-term optimization. Otherwise, you end up at "save a million, lose a billion", as this seems to be a fine example of.
Claiming this was a "power supply issue" is just lying by misdirection. The root cause is lack of redundancy, lack of resilience and lack of effective business continuity management. All things that cost money and that do not generate profit _unless_ something like this happens. In a healthy infrastructure, one (or even several) power supplies blowing up will not kill your ability to do business.
Events like that are almost universally due to gross mismanagement and should not only result in termination but also prosecution of the "leadership" that allowed this to happen by not being prepared.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you are a software provider, you can be excused for computer failure taking down your entire business. However, if you do business in the physical world (like moving people through the air), you really ought to be prepared for computer failure. Staff should be trained to use paper and telephones to check passengers in. If the tower and airplanes are operational, the rest should be able to function.
I am a programmer, and I know lots of other programmers and IT workers. With that knowledge, I would never trust my entire business to programmers and IT workers if I didn't have to.
Hush. The adults are having a grown up conversation.
And their IT had to call to India to find out how to replace it.
Telling engineers "that's not in the budget" when we ask for some extra funding to build redundancy into a system costs money. I wish MBAs would learn that.
Quote: ... "Cloud" is a faster way of saying "abdicating responsibility."
The word "cloud" is used by cloud providers to encourage cloudy thinking: Dilbert cartoon.
This Dilbert cartoon shows where cloudy thinking is leading.
Have you got a URL for that site?
.. find my fucking bag that they lost A WEEK AGO, the fucking fucks.
*cough*
A live report I heard on the BBC reported that the power supply to the data center was interrupted by a lightning strike. Granted that's just one report but that makes a hell of a lot more sense than "a" power supply going out. Either backup power didn't cut in or the distribution system took the hit.
This is quite unbelievable for any professional organisation of the size of BA.
It suggests that there is only a single site hosting all systems, and that there is no redundant or backup power supply for that site, or even worse, that they are depending on a single point of failure on a single site.
This is utterly humiliating for whichever fool was in charge of resourcing and planning BA's IT infrastructure. I'd expect that individual, or whoever dictated this setup will shortly be joining the dole queue. I'd stake a bet that this person was yet another product of the MBA culture of utter ineptitude that seem to plague UK and American business, with the typical moronic cost focused short term mindset. Personally, I now refuse to work directly with these MBA types. There myopic obsession with quarterly profit, makes it impossible for any organisation infested with their incompetence to function effectively.
Is it just coincidence that ramadan starts today? Maybe BA didn't want any muzzies blowing up their aeroplanes to celebrate?
"No the server isn't down. You must be using it wrong, idiot." *unplugs coffee maker, plugs server back in*
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
https://democrats.senate.gov/
When will people realize that the Indians are actively hostile to lots of groups/nations/people, including the Brits. Just because they pretend to speak English and work cheap they get to stand next to the important bits while management is on holiday. It's like the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Their interests are not your interests.
They cause more damage to infrastructures than anything else on the planet. Not a joke. They chew on wiring because people don't burry power lines.
Massive world wide systems like this, should always have at least two entire working deployments, one kept in a down state and one kept up and working, that way if a problem happens, you just bring the second data center online and off you go.
If a power supply issue could bring down your entire system, you didn't design it correctly, PERIOD! If your entire system hinges on a single power supply failure, you ALWAYS have a second one on an alternative supply, in fact, you'd have multiple supplies to each data center, from different providers, just to make sure power issues can't cause these types of issue.
If the problem really comes down to a power supply, fire the IT department, fire the System Architects and start doing things properly.
Airline system are usually split in various intercommuniticating system (be their own, or in case of gds external enormous firms). E.g. you have a crew system, a weight and balance system, a check in system, a baggage system, and a reservstoon system usually handled by a crs, like appolo, axsres, amadeus, galileo, infiny , etc... your booking was almost certainly saved in obe of those gds. And depending on the agreements among airline and interline set up, they can just pull each other booking (aka PNR passenger name record) and rebook onto their own flights.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...have hot swap-able power supply? Could Dell make a mission critical server that has two power supplies, both hot swap-able. That way when one goes south, the janitor can just pull the dead one and replace it with a good one.
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
Hence the second sentence starting with "Beyond a certain point".
WTF is it with people not reading past one line here recently?
Maybe someone plugged an iPad into the wrong outlet?
Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians;
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Apple - Foreign guest worker "Helen" Hung Ma caused the disastrous MobileMe product rollout.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Dell - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Delta call centers (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Fannie Mae- Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty.
GM - Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
Microsoft - Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it's lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
Microsoft - Lian Yang, Microsoft-Contracted Engineer, Arrested in Smuggling Plot After Another FBI Sting in Portland in 2010
MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
Qantas - See AirBus above
Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost Rolls $500m).
Skype ( Yarlagadda fired)
State of Indiana $867 billion FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued
State of Texas failed IBM project.
Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, has to be sold off to Oracle).
United - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure)
Visium Asset Management - Sanjay Valvani Insider trading
World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data).
Casteism
I recently booked and flew BA from Bangalore to SFO with my family. The website to do the bookings and to make changes (meal preferences for e.g) was dog slow. On the forward journey they "couldn't" print boarding passes at Bangalore for our connecting American Airlines flight at Heathrow. We barely had enough time to make the connection.
I don't know if outsourcing is to blame or they're just plain incompetent.
Gross negligence doesn't require someone dying. Gross negligence is flipping the bird to due care in handling your responsibilities. It's a term referring to liability, not damage.
You can be grossly negligent and still have no damage incurred through your gross negligence.
First you evaluate the liability. Then you evaluate the damage. Assuming the damage and liability are nonzero, then you settle.