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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.
There are some where the IT infrastructure could not handle one specific system going down, and that is not a technical issue, but something else which usually is called "gross negligence".
Technically, that's known as a single point of failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure
The term "gross negligence" doesn't come into play until a lawsuit is filed. Since no one died and/or injured from this outage, a gross inconvenience doesn't rise to gross negligence.
If you're going to have people fallback on pen and paper, they need to be trained to use pen and paper. I worked at a restaurant when a power outage took down the ordering stations. The restaurant kept doing business until the power came back online an hour later, as sunlight through the large windows and emergency lighting illuminated the interior. The kitchen kept on cooking with gas-powered appliances and emergency lights. The wait staff struggled to calculate bills and make change with only one calculator in the entire building. Management added backup power to the ordering stations a week later.
Actual BA passenger here, currently in Austin TX, and was due to fly to LHR on today's direct flight at 6pm central time. Just to highlight how catastrophic the failure is:
- Heard about the outage this morning, and looked online for more information, very little actual info available. I logged into BA with my flight booking, and the page indicated that the flight was still fine. The system also had my email address and made the statement "we will contact you if there are any problems".
- Based on this I assumed the flight was OK.
- Turned up at the airport and the BA check-in is closed. There was a large crowd of unhappy people, a haggard team of BA staff behind the counter, but no one was moving and nothing was happening. After 20 minutes I went and told the BA manager that he had better tell the crowd what is happening before things get out of hand. Eventually, he did redeem himself by doing a walk-through and chatting with people and handing out a letter explaining that the flight was canceled.
- Not only was the flight canceled, but their systems were unable to do any rescheduling. They asked us to leave the airport, find a hotel, contact them tomorrow, and ultimately seek reimbursement for expenses.
- Disappointed, I wandered down to American Airways (a One World partner, with whom I am saphire) and had a chat with their staff. As if by magic, they somehow pulled my booking from the BA system and put me on some AA flights free of charge. Amazing.
Not sure how much of it is staff incompetence, or the system is just completely fucked, but this mess is going to take days to resolve...as for me, I'm off in a few minutes, best of luck to the other BA passengers caught up in this mess!
What concerns me though is that ion spite of that, Amazon went down due to a thunderstorm. And again due to fat fingering a re-configuration.
I run my own servers. Admittedly on a much smaller scale, but Amazon has had 3 failures since the last one I had.
I can see use cases for the cloud but it's not going to give you proper high availability.