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British Airways Says IT Collapse Came After Servers Damaged By Power Problem (reuters.com)
A huge IT failure that stranded 75,000 British Airways passengers followed damage to servers that were overwhelmed when the power returned after an outage, the airline said on Wednesday. From a report: BA is seeking to limit the damage to its reputation and has apologised to customers after hundreds of flights were canceled over a long holiday weekend. The airline provided a few more details of the incident in its latest statement on Wednesday. While there was a power failure at a data center near London's Heathrow airport, the damage was caused by an overwhelming surge once the electricity was restored, it said. "There was a total loss of power at the data center. The power then returned in an uncontrolled way causing physical damage to the IT servers," BA said in a statement. "It was not an IT issue, it was a power issue."
We all know that this outage was caused by bad faith outsourcing to unqualified persons. Who are they kidding?
https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
Oh yeah, power surges are to blame! haha no.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Not to mention fail over to alternative sites.
These are transparent lies. The real issue is well known now, but it's unconformable for all involved so they're making stuff up.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
BA has a DR site independent of the primary that suffered the power issue. But volume groups were not being mirrored correctly to the DR site. When they brought the DR site online, they were getting 3 or more destinations when scanning boarding passes. And since the integrity of the DR site was an issue, it could not be used.
Then the only option is to fix the primary DC, which would have involved installing new servers / routers / switches / etc, configuring them, restoring the data to the last known good state and then bringing it back online. Good luck to anyone trying to deploy new/replacement equipment en masse during the chaos of a disaster. And then restoring data!
Takes days, not hours... unlike whatever RTO/RPO they claimed to be able to meet.
The utility providers for all of BA's major operations centers in England are all on record as saying there were no power surges, anomalies, etc. This wasn't "we're unaware of...", they all went back over their logs and categorically denied it (seems like they weren't happy about BA trying to pin any bit of this sh*t show on them). As many have pointed out above and elsewhere, none of this passes the sniff test. BA's taking a beating for this, not just over stranding passengers but how they handled the stranded passengers. Many of their communications to passengers have failed to mention BA's obligations as well as refunds and options passengers are legally entitled to. They even had the nerve to point most people to their toll customer service line instead of their toll-free one, charging people 35 pence/min to sit on hold while they were trying to get their travel plans sorted out. Even nickel and diming low cost carriers (LCC's) like RyanAir aren't stupid enough to try something like that after a system-wide disruption.