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.

Comments

Re:Other sources: IT outsourcing

[gilgongo]

It looks like BAE has recently replaced most of its IT workforce with south Asian contractors.

OT: it's BA, not BAE. The latter is a different company concerned mainly with blowing up flying objects, along with people in them. Easy mistake to make though.

Re:Busy U.K. Holiday Weekend...

[Ecuador]

It is actually "(Late) Spring bank holiday". The UK has depoliticized and dereligionized most of their holidays (notable exceptions are Christmas and Easter), so there is a bunch of "bank holidays" around the year that fall on Mondays (to provide extended weekends). This particular holiday seems to have replaced "Whit Monday" (day after Pentecost), which was a moveable Christian holiday. So, as you should expect, it is not related to the US Memorial Day.
The equivalent to the US Memorial Day for the UK (and Commonwealth nations) is the "Remembrance day" on November 11th (end date of WWI), which is not a bank holiday (so you normally go to work that day, usually wearing a poppy).

Re:Somewhere, an IT guy is crying

[Dogtanian]

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.

On the contrary, that IT guy was probably made redundant in 2016. As the BBC article notes:-

The GMB union says this meltdown could have been avoided if BA had not made hundreds of IT staff redundant and outsourced their jobs to India at the end of last year.[..]

"BA in 2016 made hundreds of dedicated and loyal IT staff redundant and outsourced the work to India... many viewed the company's actions as just plain greedy."

Let's hope BA continues to reap as many "savings" from that outsourcing as they did today. :-)

He's crying today.

Going by the likely response of the laid-off employees to the predicament of BA, I guess he *would* have tears coming out of his eyes.

Re:Somewhere, an IT guy is crying

[Dogtanian]

Don't blame the IT workers.

Pretty sure I never did that.

Any blame I'd put at the feet of whatever amoral rent-a-manager decided he could save a few pennies by ditching their established IT staff then contracting their jobs out to a third party company on the other side of the world.

Let's face it, there *are* likely quite a few talented IT people from India- but as the Indians themselves have said, the good ones are probably working in other countries, or at least not for race-to-the-bottom contractors likely paying peanuts to staff with patchy educational skills. The contractor probably making a *very* nice profit on them- still appearing cheaper than the client's existing staff, while overselling their talent. (And I've no doubt that those employees are peons to whatever mediocre middle management the contractor has- and their circumstances in general- so it's questionable how much they're to blame personally).

I've absolutely no doubt that the (apparent) ability to treat IT staff as a pure commodity is very appealing to such managers. At least until the shit hits the fan and it turns out that (surprise, surprise) it doesn't always work that way.

Even if it was a power supply issue (and I'm pretty sceptical about that), it sounds like the resulting problems would still be a result of their penny-pinching sacking of the experienced staff most likely to know what they were doing (and be in a position to do it). It's sure as hell not their responsibility any more. And given how they were treated, they'd be perfectly entitled to feel schadenfreude at their former employer's travails.

Re:Somewhere, an IT guy is crying

[fluffernutter]

Stop it with the whole 'they should use cloud' nonsense.. First of all, most airlines are still on mainframes, and most of them get uptimes close to Amazon. From a mainframe. Can you believe it?