Soldato
British Airways - Massive IT Disruption Worldwide
- Thread starter chrismscotland
- Start date
It's also a (sometimes justified) reluctance to embrace the 'new' way of doing things - granted there will be legacy systems that cannot be re-architected but if new things are being developed without the cloudy mindset that means instances get killed when they break, new ones are deployed to replace them, work is shared across all nodes etc. then you end up with a system that can only really run on top of hardware that you own, so now you're in the hardware support business that you really don't care to be in.
At this point Netflix seems more able to handle unforseen hardware issues than a major airline, which is pretty damning.
That's going to be a huge european compo claim.
And how bad is their IT system, to ground all flights. BA has claimed it's a power supply issue and not them being hacked. Did they have a single server plugged into wall socket or what?
And how bad is their IT system, to ground all flights. BA has claimed it's a power supply issue and not them being hacked. Did they have a single server plugged into wall socket or what?
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Soldato
Cleaner probably unplugged the dusty old Win 3.11 machine in the corner
Soldato
Flight's just been cancelled... Going to be a very unhappy 5 year old in the morning!
Only allowed to rebook up until the 10 the of June, which is useful considering the summer holidays don't start till middle of July! >_<
Am guessing our travel insurance isn't going to cover the cost of the hotel we're currently staying in or the parking for the week since we've used it so that's £150 down the drain, grr!
Only allowed to rebook up until the 10 the of June, which is useful considering the summer holidays don't start till middle of July! >_<
Am guessing our travel insurance isn't going to cover the cost of the hotel we're currently staying in or the parking for the week since we've used it so that's £150 down the drain, grr!
That sucks Haggisman 
My Mrs. Has just been able to do online check-in for her flight (also departing at 8am) so I can only assume your cancellation is due to their planes being out of position from the disruption yesterday.
I'm sure yesterday BA said you could claim hotel expenses against them if your insurance won't cover it.
Really sucks.
My Mrs. Has just been able to do online check-in for her flight (also departing at 8am) so I can only assume your cancellation is due to their planes being out of position from the disruption yesterday.
I'm sure yesterday BA said you could claim hotel expenses against them if your insurance won't cover it.
Really sucks.
Soldato
- Joined
- 31 May 2009
- Posts
- 21,257
Get on the phone to them in case they can switch you, there might be alternative seating.
Soldato
Yup, in the hotel lobby ATM trying to get through, not feeling particularly confident though! Think there's only 1 flight a day where we're going (Zagreb). Still loads of people getting on the airport bus though, lucky sods! 
I've been caught up in this....
Have been on holiday to Riviera Maya. Was due to fly back to Gatwick from Cancun today. Had no idea what had happened until we overheard an American couple on the next table at lunch talking about it. We didn't receive any information email/ text/ phone) to advise what was going on. After trying to access flight status on their website for ages which wouldn't load, I expect because of the high usage it did load and said our flight was cancelled. Our hotel was fully booked and BA wouldn't cover the cost of it anyway so we got our transfer to the airport. Waited in line for nearly 4 hours as they tried to put everyone on different flights tomorrow and the day after.
It turns out we now have to stay a night in Cancun then return tomorrow and get an American Airlines flight to Dallas then get another AA flight from Dallas to Heathrow 6 hours later. Then we need to make our way back to Gatwick to collect the car.
Soz for the rant but it's a right mess of a situation....
Have been on holiday to Riviera Maya. Was due to fly back to Gatwick from Cancun today. Had no idea what had happened until we overheard an American couple on the next table at lunch talking about it. We didn't receive any information email/ text/ phone) to advise what was going on. After trying to access flight status on their website for ages which wouldn't load, I expect because of the high usage it did load and said our flight was cancelled. Our hotel was fully booked and BA wouldn't cover the cost of it anyway so we got our transfer to the airport. Waited in line for nearly 4 hours as they tried to put everyone on different flights tomorrow and the day after.
It turns out we now have to stay a night in Cancun then return tomorrow and get an American Airlines flight to Dallas then get another AA flight from Dallas to Heathrow 6 hours later. Then we need to make our way back to Gatwick to collect the car.
Soz for the rant but it's a right mess of a situation....
Soldato
Damn, and I thought we had it bad
Finally got through after an hour on hold managed to rebook for tomorrow morning with confirmation they'll pay for our room tonight...
Now to get some sleep!
Finally got through after an hour on hold managed to rebook for tomorrow morning with confirmation they'll pay for our room tonight...
Now to get some sleep!
Soldato
Wow. I get stressed when the plane leaves half an hour late and I'm just flying solo for a business trip - dread to think how things are with you both. Best of luck getting it sorted.
I'm struggling to imagine how a problem like this can be "a power supply issue".
Soldato
BA IT staff told their CEO they needed greater redundancy... So he fired them.
They're called Tata because that's what they say once they've got your money.
Tata have stated they'll be flying hundreds of engineers to the UK to resolve the problem. As soon as they find an airline able to transport them.
They're called Tata because that's what they say once they've got your money.
Tata have stated they'll be flying hundreds of engineers to the UK to resolve the problem. As soon as they find an airline able to transport them.
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If I were senior management in BA or it's affiliates, I'd demand an after action review on this fiasco. How much real money has been lost in unused flights/airspace, compensation, hotels, meals and then the un-quantifiable damage to the company's reputation. Whatever the reason for the outage I'm sure it's prevention measures would have cost them less, but someone made the call to save money at that moment in time.
As more and more critical infrastructure is computerised and connected by the inept profit driven few we put ourselves at greater risk of these type of events happening. I just hope the company in charge of BA's IT doesn't win the contract for the UK's nuclear power station programme.
As more and more critical infrastructure is computerised and connected by the inept profit driven few we put ourselves at greater risk of these type of events happening. I just hope the company in charge of BA's IT doesn't win the contract for the UK's nuclear power station programme.
Soldato
Unfortunately for you (if you were senior management in BA), the name that would most prominently figure in the resulting report would probably be your boss's.
Now if the investors demand such a report, they might just get it.I think it's fine to pursue profit. The big issue is that it always seems to be short-term profit. CEOs don't stick around that long and they get bonuses tied to profit for that year, not that five or ten years. And that's the way the investors want it (until like this weekend it suddenly costs them) because they're not interested in the company, they're just interested in getting a fast return. It would work great if people sought to maximise profit over ten or fifteen years. Instead, the incentives are set up to drive short term gain. If someone can sell off their future viability without getting called on it, they will.
Eh? What does this mean? Do you mean moved to commodity infra?
Unfortunately for you (if you were senior management in BA), the name that would most prominently figure in the resulting report would probably be your boss's.
Probably true!
Indeed, short term vision. I doubt this will even affect their share price so they will see this problem as a bit of a blip.
Anything that's critical and connected is at risk unless measures are put in place to mitigate it. How can one power supply issue ground the entire fleet of BA? This is gross ineptitude.
Hopefully flying BA later today to Mallorca with my family. I use BA a lot for work and it has been something of a halo brand. I'm gold on the exec club and like the benefits of that but with this fiasco and the devaluing of their short hall service with paid food and drinks, they are starting to chip away at my loyalty.
Just got home after dropping my partner off at Heathrow.
T5 is utter chaos — there's a queue snaking from one end of the terminal and back again, filled with people trying to rebook flights from yesterday.
This intersects with other queues for check-in and baggage drop, so you get people joining the wrong queue or filtering into the wrong queue when they overlap.
The staff barely seem to know what's going on; there's little or no crowd-control so people keep queue jumping or cutting through the lines in order to get to different parts of the terminal.
When you do actually get close to the check-in desks, they're pre-checking everyone in the queue to make sure they're in the right place and/or their flights are still running. This makes sense, but it's taking forever, so you're stood a metre away from five empty self-serve check-in desks…
This was all at 6am when the majority of flights were still scheduled. I've just got off the phone to my Mrs. and her flight is delayed by a couple of hours, many flights are delayed by a lot more than that and many more have been cancelled. So a lot of people are going to arrive assuming their flights are still scheduled (because that's what they're saying on the news etc) and they're just going to add to the chaos and confusion.
As I was leaving, they had staff at the main entrance turning people away, telling them to come back 90 minutes before their departure time. This sounds ludicrous to me; there's no way people are going to get through that mess, pass security and get to their gate within 90 minutes.
@Haggisman, I'm glad you've got another flight booked but be aware of the above — good luck!
T5 is utter chaos — there's a queue snaking from one end of the terminal and back again, filled with people trying to rebook flights from yesterday.
This intersects with other queues for check-in and baggage drop, so you get people joining the wrong queue or filtering into the wrong queue when they overlap.
The staff barely seem to know what's going on; there's little or no crowd-control so people keep queue jumping or cutting through the lines in order to get to different parts of the terminal.
When you do actually get close to the check-in desks, they're pre-checking everyone in the queue to make sure they're in the right place and/or their flights are still running. This makes sense, but it's taking forever, so you're stood a metre away from five empty self-serve check-in desks…
This was all at 6am when the majority of flights were still scheduled. I've just got off the phone to my Mrs. and her flight is delayed by a couple of hours, many flights are delayed by a lot more than that and many more have been cancelled. So a lot of people are going to arrive assuming their flights are still scheduled (because that's what they're saying on the news etc) and they're just going to add to the chaos and confusion.
As I was leaving, they had staff at the main entrance turning people away, telling them to come back 90 minutes before their departure time. This sounds ludicrous to me; there's no way people are going to get through that mess, pass security and get to their gate within 90 minutes.
@Haggisman, I'm glad you've got another flight booked but be aware of the above — good luck!
Most enterprise data centre infrastructure is firstly highly resilient and a single power supply would never cause a problem. But that isnt enough for most businesses, which is why you have disaster recovery. The sad thing is, most businesses have DR but never do tests.... so when things go horribly wrong, it is exacerbated because IT don't know whether to invoke DR or not because who knows whether it will actually work.
TCS have a lot to answer for and knowing the infrastructure they widely standardise on for clients, I look forward to hearing stories at work on Tuesday
