BA IT system down. How? Why?

It's fifteen years since I was seriously working in IT, but even then such a complete breakdown would have been almost inconceivable in a major network. Since when comms facilities, mass storage and processor power have all risen exponentially, with the size of the equipment falling dramatically.

BA are saying a major power failure has caused all passenger check-ins and baggage handling systems globally to crash. One!!?? "BA said a problem within the hub of their system, based near Heathrow, had led to a power outage".

Surely something that could affect BA worldwide should have at least two if not more mirrored systems/hubs geographically far apart? With dedicated links with minimal latency. It was possible in my day, so what and why and how can this have happened?

Is there anyone here dealing with large mission-critical systems able to suggest how BA have messed up so badly other than through penny-pinching and complete incompetence of their IT management?

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 27-May-17 22:35:25)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Is there anyone here dealing with large mission-critical systems able to suggest how BA have messed up so badly other than through penny-pinching and complete incompetence of their IT management?

I think you pretty much nailed it there

Don't blame the IT team....

I'm sure they just forgot their own advise and missed the 2nd bit of turning it back on


Or on a more serious note. It ask for X Bean counters say No.

It seems to me that a bank holiday/half term weekend is just the time for mischief.

One week NHS, another British Airways

Poor security, bad software design all make it too easy

Major wake up call to industry generally

In reply to a post by 961a:

One week NHS, another British Airways

There are differences... the NHS (amongst others) was clearly the victim of an attack, there doesn't appear to be any evidence, or reason to assume, the same for BA.

There's an old saying- don't automatically assume conspiracy when simple incompetence provides an adequate explanation.

Major wake up call to industry generally

True, but to look at resilience as well as security.

Does every organisation fully understand the underlying assets that support their services? A common one is a switch going down taking a service offline, hard to mitigate against with zero downtime.

Also do you think every organisation has upto date patching for all software pieces and OS? There is a tonne of legacy out there often with denial of service vulnerabilities associated with it.

Probably still running Windows Me....

It's a great OS, it doesn't get any of those annoying windows updates anymore. Perfect.

I remember reading somewhere that BA had laid off many experienced IT staff and outsourced some work to India in 2016.

That always goes well doesn't it.

Yes but.

2016 was too late as well. The infrastructure I believe was not fit for purpose long before that. It can't have been removed since that happened.