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.