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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!!!
MBA to board: I've got a great idea to cut costs! It will save millions!
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!
The Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975. In a very detailed way, it described how common business-planning stategies fail when applied to information technology projects. But did anyone listen? We've known how to avoid these sorts of problems for over 40 years!
I didn't realized that the British celebrated U.S. Memorial Day weekend.
Ramadan starts today, and Monday is the Spring Bank Holiday, when many schools and businesses close.
It's my vague recollection that at least one other airline had a power-related IT outage within the last year or so.
I would have thought "reliable power at scale" was a solved problem.
...the outsourced IT guys from TCS in India need to fly to the UK to fix the 'power supply' issue but currently they are unable to book a flight on British Airways.....
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.
Ramadan starts today
Maybe it's a good thing all the flights are grounded, then.
***MUSLIM EXPLODES***
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.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
"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.
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).
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
.. find my fucking bag that they lost A WEEK AGO, the fucking fucks.
*cough*
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!
The international language of business is English.
Did you know that England isn't in the US?
"No the server isn't down. You must be using it wrong, idiot." *unplugs coffee maker, plugs server back in*
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.