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IT Crash Causes British Airways To Cancel All Flights (cnbc.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the flight-delays dept.

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.

5 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. a power supply failure?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!!!

  2. Re:Other sources: IT outsourcing by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.
  3. Re:Somewhere, an IT guy is crying by grasshoppa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    move the services onto a cloud provider

    "Cloud" service providers have no place in mission critical roles by virtue that the "Cloud" is a faster way of saying "abdicating responsibility". If you make millions of dollars a day on the back of your IT infrastructure, then the last thing you do is outsource the responsibility of said infrastructure to a 3rd party company which has different priorities than you do.

    Any IT manager making such a recommendation is a) lazy, b) useless and c) should be fired.

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    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
  4. Re:The major issue is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Either amature hour or a lie by Murdoch5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.