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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

bbc.com

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Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#171

Post by mkempe »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #140

>BA chief executive Alex Cruz said: "We believe the root cause was a power supply issue." // That shut down BA operations World wide? Does that seem likely? Possible? They don't have power fail-over and operational centres in different countries? I've been re-shaping my aluminium foil hat and wondering if there wasn't a specific terrorist threat that's been covered up; but then where I am there have been 2 cities suf…

Same thought here. Ten years ago the UK foiled a terrorist plot to bomb 6-7 airplanes in flight from the UK to the US. That's the origin of the ban on bringing large amounts of liquid on board. [1] The recent bomb in Manchester was apparently made using peroxide, too.

Assuming they identified a real, immediate, and massive threat, I can see why they would prefer to ground all planes until they've sorted things out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#172

Post by isostatic »

matteo789 wrote: post #156
gaius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish engineers are sometimes a bit late when it comes to the new technologies, but are very good compared to ones from, for example, Ireland. It doesn't matter. They are no smarter than BA's original British engineers, but with decades less experience on those systems. Even if they were smarter - and in general the talent prefers to work for real companies, not bodyshops, so that's unlikely - they can't compensate…

Polish engineers, similarly to Polish fighter jet pilots in WWII, who saved your lazy british asses BTW, do have high-reliability IT systems experience, due to major investment banks and GDSs operating in the Cracow area. Next time you write something, do some research dude. It shows how ignorant you brits are, especially taking into account the recent Brexit vote !

Only 52% of us.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#173

Post by justinclift »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #168
justinclift wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an example a person in a tech leader role at a major company in the UK who I thought may be interested in hearing about a product was quite rude about me never contacting them again ... You didn't spam them did you? Your description of their behaviour sounds a lot like the standard response to spammers. eg FOAD

No I did not, and that's the issue, a lot of these people are not actually interested in making things any better, they'd rather not be disturbed instead. And then something like what happened today happens. And then people are misdirecting blame to others. The leadership is in most cases to blame.

Interesting. What approach did you use to tell them about the product they hadn't heard of before?

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#174

Post by BillinghamJ »

2manyredirects wrote: post #158

One of the unions has been quick to attribute the issue to the outsourcing to India of some of the IT responsibility, which the right wing press here has been all too eager to publish, but BA have rebuffed this and said at this stage they believe the root cause was a power supply issue - sure, that could be attributed somewhere along the lines to an 'alpha male business asshole' (as I read in one of the comments here…

Their system should be built in a way which makes it resistant to a power supply issue. That is the fault of however built it, whether onshore or off.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#175

Post by isostatic »

markonen wrote: post #10

The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow). Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.

Until about 2 years ago I was gold guest list with BA - spending £30k+ a year with them, and sending lots of others on BA.

Their high costs were fine, but then they started cost cutting more and more, and enough was enough. everyone I know has twigged that in Europe easyJet are far better, and longer haul virgin, the gulf carriers, and even USian carriers, are better.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#176

Post by Clubber »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #165
raesene9 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security costs money, reliability costs money. If it's not in your contract, you don't pay for it. if there's any outage that is because the customer didn't ask you do do something that's their fault not yours. For example would you as an IT outsourcer pay for a redundant datacentre if your contract didn't call for it? Would you patch all your systems immediately even if it caused availability issues if it wasn't exp…

>For example would you as an IT outsourcer pay for a redundant datacentre if your contract didn't call for it? I would assume that the contract calls for particular service levels and that downing the entire fleet of a large carrier for days is in breach of that contract. If the contract says "provide service X with 99.999% availability" the service provider cannot come back and say, oh but you forgot to specify that…

>If the contract says "provide service X with 99.999% availability"

If you read those contracts, you have to read what the consequences are for breaking that uptime guarantee. Usually it's something silly like 10% off your next bill.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#178

Post by isostatic »

mkempe wrote: post #171
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #140

>BA chief executive Alex Cruz said: "We believe the root cause was a power supply issue." // That shut down BA operations World wide? Does that seem likely? Possible? They don't have power fail-over and operational centres in different countries? I've been re-shaping my aluminium foil hat and wondering if there wasn't a specific terrorist threat that's been covered up; but then where I am there have been 2 cities suf…

Same thought here. Ten years ago the UK foiled a terrorist plot to bomb 6-7 airplanes in flight from the UK to the US. That's the origin of the ban on bringing large amounts of liquid on board. [1] The recent bomb in Manchester was apparently made using peroxide, too. Assuming they identified a real, immediate, and massive threat, I can see why they would prefer to ground all planes until they've sorted things out. […

Half the planes taking off at Heathrow are not BA. If they wanted to ground the planes, shutting down ATC would be the better way.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#179

Post by StavrosK »

2manyredirects wrote: post #158

One of the unions has been quick to attribute the issue to the outsourcing to India of some of the IT responsibility, which the right wing press here has been all too eager to publish, but BA have rebuffed this and said at this stage they believe the root cause was a power supply issue - sure, that could be attributed somewhere along the lines to an 'alpha male business asshole' (as I read in one of the comments here…

I've found that not only is it good to not assign blame in postmortems, but it's also accurate: The culprit usually is the checks and balances, as mistakes will happen, and the goal should be to have failsafes and detection.

I'm reminded of airplane accidents: Whenever you hear of an airplane accident, it's always some amazingly crazy series of things going exactly wrong to get the plane to crash. We have a tendency to think "wow, what bad luck", but a better way to think about it is that airplanes are so safe that an accident' can't occur unless a whole series of things go very specifically wrong.

A company's goal should be to increase the number of necessary things that need to all go wrong before there is downtime.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#180

Post by DanBC »

isostatic wrote: post #172
matteo789 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish engineers, similarly to Polish fighter jet pilots in WWII, who saved your lazy british asses BTW, do have high-reliability IT systems experience, due to major investment banks and GDSs operating in the Cracow area. Next time you write something, do some research dude. It shows how ignorant you brits are, especially taking into account the recent Brexit vote !

Only 52% of us.

Only 26% voted for Brexit.

There's a bunch of people not eligible to vote; eligible but not-voting; as well as those voting against brexit.

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