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BRITISH AIRWAYS SAYS it hopes to resume most flights out of London’s major airports today after a computer systems failure caused chaos for thousands of passengers on a busy holiday weekend.
It warned of some “knock-on disruption” to schedules as aircraft and crews are out of position around the world.
“At this stage we are aiming to operate a near-normal schedule of flights from Gatwick and the majority of our Heathrow services,” it said in a statement.
It advised passengers not to come to the two airports unless they have confirmed bookings.
BA cancelled all its flights out of Heathrow and Gatwick on Saturday after the IT failure, which shut down all of the carrier’s check-in and operational systems and affected call centres and its website.
However it did not appear to be a cyber-attack, according to a video statement by chairman and chief executive Alex Cruz.
Britain is still recovering from a ransomware attack that crippled crucial infrastructure earlier this month.
“We believe the root cause was a power supply issue,” said Cruz, adding that IT teams were working “tirelessly” to fix the problems.
Full refunds will be given to customers who decide they no longer wish to travel, Cruz said.
The outage came on a busy weekend in Britain, where Monday is a public holiday and many schoolchildren are beginning their mid-term break.
An AFP photographer at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 on Saturday said many travellers were waiting outside the departure area with their luggage in “chaotic” scenes.
They were not being allowed inside the terminal for health and safety reasons, prompting some of them to leave in taxis.
“None of your staff know what the heck is going on. Nor do your passengers. Can we have some info please? Chaos here,” tweeted Chris Ship, Royal Editor for ITV News, to BA.
The carrier said it was “extremely sorry” for causing inconvenience over the holiday period.
The airline has suffered other IT glitches recently, leading to severe delays for passengers in July and September last year.
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It was a power outage that brought down their IT network,according to their spokesman, what they did not clarify was that they outsourced their IT to India and laid off most of their Tech Engineers.
They have had 6 outages this year.
Power cuts are common in India, and the cost cutting Accountants in BA don’t have the practical nouce, to buy a few standby generators.
@DeFonz: you should tell them
@DeFonz: their data centres are in the UK. On the assumption that both didn’t have power cuts – I guess the conservation they will be having next week will be obvious
It has Nothing To do with hacking and No ransom was paid.
Absolutely Nothing to do with hacking or a ransom.
Nothing you hear!
Nothing at all at all.
Diddly squat.
Nout.
Naffin.
Got it?
@Brendan McLaughlin: are you trying to tell us something
@Brendan McLaughlin: With that kind of insider knowledge I can’t understand why you’re wasting your time commenting here and not running the NSA.
How can a company this size not have a redundant IT infrastructure setup, outsourced or not. A power supply failure causing such a long downtime period seems unlikely.
have your say