In news that shouldn’t come as a shock, British Airways has announced that it is to abandon its flying programme for the day from London Heathrow and London Gatwick.
The announcement on Twitter was made a few minutes ago.
Following a major IT system failure this morning, we’ve cancelled all flights to and from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of today. 1/2
— British Airways (@British_Airways) May 27, 2017
We’re working hard to get anyone due to fly today, onto the next available flights. Those unable to fly, will be offered a full refund. 2/2
— British Airways (@British_Airways) May 27, 2017
Earlier today, the airline had an issue with its IT infrastructure and systems that knocked its services offline – ranging from checkin, ramp and even its own web site.
Alex Cruz, CEO of British Airways has released a video addressing the concerns today:
— British Airways (@British_Airways) May 27, 2017
Passengers are advised NOT to travel to the airport today unless your flight is operating.
In addition, advice has been given under EC261/2004 and how to claim for the delay.
BA official position on refunds for cancellations and delays today. Please retweet to those outside the airport @British_Airways #BA pic.twitter.com/APbDGeehK4
— Luke Hallard (@fLukeozade) May 27, 2017
British Airways has suffered IT services outages in the past – but today’s is a whole new level, costing the airline a day of minimal flying on its network.
Issues appear to be at one of British Airways data-centres, with a power supply causing a domino effect across its systems – with no evidence of a cyber attack.
Hopefully, overnight will give the airline’s IT Resources to activate any of its remaining contingency plans so that flights can resume tomorrow.
Sadly, whilst he meltdown wasn’t preventable, the airlines cutting of internal IT staff hasn’t helped today (where any IT literate pair of hands would be useful).
Not a good day for the airline – in any sense of the word.
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Virgin Atlantic, delta and American should see a flurry of last minute bookings. I bet you delta is gonna raise the award prices again in light of this.
“Sadly, whilst he meltdown wasn’t preventable,”
What? A power failure at one datacenter cascading into a total collapse – how is that anything but preventable?
It simply should not have been able to happen. This is why we have drills.
And obviously contingency planning was also severely lacking.
If you’ve been in the middle of a meltdown (I was a couple of weeks ago), you’ll know what’s preventalbe and what’s not.
Sadly, it seems, BA’s core infrastructure has been hit hard with a cascade. Doesn’t matter if it’s a single power supply on a server, a SAN or a building. If it hits, it hits.
Failing to switch over any other services is a matter how quickly you can catch the fault.
I’ve been saying for years that airlines need to invest more in backup systems, not to the level we had when I worked in the securities industry (in trading systems, acceptable outages are measured in seconds, which would be unnecessary almost anywhere else), but the idea that an outage can bring a world-class airline to a near-halt for the better part of a day for lack of system redundancy is absurd.