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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!!!
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!
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.
"We" (as in people that actually have a clue what they are doing) have indeed known that. But the decision-makers have no such understanding. While it is really tacky, I have had to explain catastrophe scenarios to customers that would have killed their company, and all that was needed was a failed software functionality update (which they wanted to do without a possibility to roll-back and no working plan for keeping business going any other way). The people making the decisions these days are bean-counters with zero understanding of risk-management or "visionaries" that have even less of an understanding about the reality of things. And, unfortunately, this often is aided by a corporate culture of "don't rock the boat" and people that warn of consequences get silenced.
Expect more of these utterly pathetic failures.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Power supply failure" does not take down a well-designed and well-maintained infrastructure. This is just a smokescreen to hide incompetence.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Funny, but the bigger issue is there anyone at Tata that was there the last time BA restarted their systems? At the bank I used to work at, we were replaced by contractors, and two years later when they restarted the zSystem, they found-out the hard way that no one knew what to do.
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.