British Airways CEO Won't Resign, Says Outsourcing Not To Blame For IT Failure (bbc.com)

British Airways CEO Alex Cruz insisted he would not resign on Monday as he sought to draw a line under three days of chaos at the UK flag carrier after IT problems left tens of thousands of passenger stranded. In an interview -- the first since a global computer outage all but shut the airline down -- Cruz said he doesn't think "it would make much of use for me to resign." Separately, he also denied an outsourcing deal was to blame for the IT problems that hit on Saturday, causing the airline to cancel almost all its services over the weekend. From a report: A leaked staff email revealed Mr Cruz had told staff not to comment on the system failure. When asked about the email he told the BBC the tone was clear: "Stop moaning and come and help us." The airline is now close to full operational capacity after the problems resulted in mass flight cancellations at Heathrow and Gatwick over the bank holiday weekend. Questions remain about how a power problem could have had such impact, said the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. One theory was that returning systems were unusable as the data had become unsynchronised. [...] Cruz told the BBC a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes," but the back-up system had not worked properly. He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.

Comments

Re:So glad I never use BA - (the Sucky Airline).

[AmiMoJo]

They seem to be generally quite incompetent. Endless staff walk-outs over conditions, indicating poor labour relations. The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards. Even the staff uniforms are just terrible, especially the women's which don't seem to have changed since the 60s and require that garish red lipstick.

In any case, Cruz is to blame for this. Ultimately, there should have been regular tests of the backup systems and a plan to quickly recover if it did fail, and it was his responsibility to ensure that those things happened.

I imagine he will be punished harshly with a slightly reduced bonus this year.