The Outage at British Airways

[SeijiSensei]

Does anyone else find it at best puzzling that a supposed "power supply" failure at one location in BA's vast network brought the entire ticketing system to its knees? I accept their claim that this incident was not the result of terrorism, but if not, it seems to be the result of remarkably poor IT planning and funding. No immediately available back up power? No alternative system ready to be brought up in the case of disaster?

I thought the airlines long ago set up large shared computer networks like SABRE, but apparently for most activities, it's basically roll-your-own (http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/08/technology/airline-computer-systems/).

[wildmanne39]

Indeed it seems odd, but I do not know much about their system over their.

[mastablasta]

they outsourced it at the end of last year to India. layed off hundreds of dedicated and loyal IT staff.

i think maybe monsoon season started and well it is not uncommon to get power outages durign that time. :-)

i really like it when greed backfires. i am only sorry for the stranded passangers.

[sp40140]

They would never revel all the details. And we will never know enough to point to the real culprit.
They are BA they should be managing power surges, it's server 101. They are not some home desktop. And even many home users plug their desktops to UPSs.
Back-Up should also kick in automatically. There shouldn't be manual intervention required unless needed.
As to outsourcing, well it's not their fault. Just like everything in real life... you get what you pay for. Chinese manufacturing gets lots of bad rep for being low quality. But iPhones are made in China as well. So, if you pay you get quality. Same applies to skill labour.