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All BA flights from Heathrow and Gatwick cancelled due to 'IT Failure'

Dos_Box

By Dos_Box
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elsiegee40

elsiegee40

Posted
Posted
They are now saying if BA hadnt outsourced the IT jobs to India this wouldn't have happen.

 

The unions probably would. Whether or not that's actually the case is another matter.

mikeprice

mikeprice

Posted
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What's the betting that someone high up in BAs IT dept has been organising their emails referring to budget for backup improvements over the last few years and making sure they are safe

 

 

Looks like it could have been a 'massive power failure' - which is strange with the existance of UPS systmes, generators and remote hot standby technology etc etc

 

possibly an outsourcing company have 'economised' on their promises to have resiliant power etc

forkies

forkies

Posted
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Seems they are having issues regularly. They had their new check in system fail in September 2016 and I am sure something else went wrong months before that. Not good at all.
AlanD

AlanD

Posted
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I am often (possibly sadly) pleased when these major ICT systems fail - be it banks, airlines, mobile operators (and perhaps less so the NHS). When these have armies of very highly paid, and indeed very highly skilled network employees and managers (...but perhaps that is part of the problem too) and their systems fail - I take some comfort for the very little downtime our school network has experienced in a decade. True - its a much smaller scale, and much less complicated - but nevertheless still vulnerable to all kinds of failure that I worry about daily. Are my UPS batteries OK? Are my redundant fibre links working via alternative paths around the school? Is the next Microsoft patch going to cripple something unexpectedly? If I wasn't worrying about some kit which is getting old, I worry about new replacement kit which often seems more prone to failure than the old stuff. The fact is - as I often tell the headmaster and governors - is that ICT systems do and will fail from time to time despite everyone's best effort and regardless of how much money you throw at it. And more money and sophistication doesn't always make your system more robust (as the Russian T34 tank proved in the second world war). I hope we do get to learn what went wrong for BA. My guess is that it will be something that no body takes responsibility for.
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Oddbod

Oddbod

Posted
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Can only imagine that the Indian outsourcing company over promised and under delivered… and it won't be manglement for the chop, but the data centre grunts that warned about underfunding in backup systems months earlier…

 

Also amazing how education IT has to fight tooth and nail for every upgrade of systems, but are told “there's nothing available”… but the moment things go bang, money appears quicker than a lottery win to throw at the issue!

3s-gtech

3s-gtech

Posted
Posted

I bet it all comes back to a UPD that hasn't had new batteries for a while, that have no swollen and stuck in there. I picture this UPS having daisy-chained four way adaptors on full load running from it...

 

Very surprising that with the importance and commercial reliance on these systems that this could happen. Heads will roll, and probably not the right ones.

6Foot2

6Foot2

Posted
Posted (edited)

Ryanair tweet makes light of BA IT issues:

 

Link:

[Twitter Picture]

 

Ryan Air Tweet.JPG

Edited by 6Foot2
Ryanair, not Ryain Air. :(
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6Foot2

6Foot2

Posted
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Link: Home Office ignores plight of BA techies as job offshoring looms [The Register]

 

The Home Office has stonewalled the GMB trade union’s attempts to raise the plight of British Airways IT staff whose jobs are being sent to an Indian outsourcer – and the potential security implications involved.

 

The GMB has written four letters to the Department’s Secretary Theresa May – seen by us – after BA hired Tata Consultancy Services to run systems, putting hundreds of UK jobs at risk of redundancy.

 

Mick Rix, national officer at GMB, first raised the point in January that outsourcing systems, some of which “are crucial to national security”, was of concern for the country’s future safety...

Michael

Michael

Posted
Posted

The strategy of these large corporations towards IT personnel just doesn't stack up. In the context of BA, I'm speculating their datacenter must be in the UK somewhere, so it makes sense to have key personnel close by too.

 

We live in the age whereby it's easy to manage vast amounts of systems/data from a distance, so I can understand why it looks attractive to outsource services abroad; but there isn't a solution to when systems go wrong, especially when it's something physical.

 

BA no doubt spend a healthy amount of money on its IT operations - without it the business just won't function, and the losses can be catastrophic when it goes down. You'd think that with a business the nature of BA, they'd be separate datacentres in two physical locations or more which logically would have avoided problems such as a power surge.

 

I'm not convinced the issue was solely power related, but then we probably never will find out for sure.

TechMonkey

TechMonkey

Posted
Posted
Hmmmm

 

2 data centres 1km affected by the same power surge caused by power reconnecting at one centre

 

seems a little strange

The problem is without a proper after action report everyone outside of BA is stabbing in the dark. My first thought after hearing the latest was I bet someone turned something off, realized their mistake and then plugged it back in quickly (natural reaction). This put some transfer or failover system off kilter having both data-centers live, making everything fall over. This would explain why it took so long to bring back as engineers would have had to do some direct work either promoting or demoting systems, probably manually, and then get the fail-over system to think straight before bringing it all back up. If the mistake had just been left alone and the power left off the fail over will have happened and the site with no power brought back up correctly. But this is all just hypothesis and that explanation could be smoke and mirrors to cover up under-investment.

 

I was reading elsewhere that the response of the company is a good indication of the working ethos. Amazon as a case, when they had a failure due to an engineer entering a command incorrectly decide that the issue was a company wide failing as the developers hadn't made it so the incorrect command could not be used, the system being used was at fault because a command could be initiated for a large section of the infrastructure at once and the engineers team was at fault for not thinking about the change they were about to make properly. In BAs case, they are putting the blame on one person but not looking at why this person could take the power down and why the system fouled up after it happened.

mikeprice

mikeprice

Posted
Posted

Good point

 

what you said about the engineer plugging it back in makes sense

 

also - the culture is also a good point

 

many years ago we had a problem (when I was in industry) due to an operator entering an incorrect date

 

it took a while - but we managed to convince the management that the downtime was due to the system not spotting the wrong date (it was miles out) and hence the operator didn't need to be shouted at - procedures (and programs) were changed and it never happened again

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