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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!!!
...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.....
"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
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
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.. 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!
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.