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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

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Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#201

Post by sdfhbdf »

webtechgal wrote: post #122
RekentonBot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India I can understand, but what is your deal with Poland? Historically Poland has excelled in stuff like mathematics and Polish programmers are very skilled. A Polish team even came in second in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition recently, so wtf dude?

> India I can understand,... Care to elaborate a bit?

I think it refers to the telemarketers and tech support stereotype of India.

In this view, India is portrayed valuing quantity over quality.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#202

Post by jacquesm »

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…

If an error makes it into production it is always process, never an individual, even if the individual involved was malicious. The only thing you can do with errors is fix them, learn from them, and then fix the process too.

Assigning blame does not move the needle at all.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#203

Post by iamacynic »

raesene9 wrote: post #143
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why an IT outsourcing company would not have the greatest incentive to take security and reliability extremely seriously. Is there anything worse for an IT service provider than being blamed for a massive IT outage at a global corporation? This is headline news. And I don't see any difficult contractual issues at all. On the contrary. A massive outage, by definition, means that the contractual obligation…

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…

this is all correct and will not change until we reach a critical mass of devastating failures/breaches.

until then, don't hold your breath. people learn their lessons the hard way.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#204

Post by tutufan »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #21

I have zero evidence, and am simply working through a though exercise, but it could be targeted? Maybe a group on behalf of a nation state is testing out its muscle. Or sending a warning. Maybe the UK did something recently a nation didn't like, and this is the new form of "diplomatic protest". Or sending a warning shot. I remember reading last year that the large Delta airlines outage was cyber terror related. It re…

Maybe, but I suspect the effects of stupidity would be so strong that you'd never be able to detect the effects of a hostile nation.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#205

Post by coldcode »

tyingq wrote: post #54
coldcode wrote: post #50

Airlines these days are run by a complex set of systems most of which have to work in order to have the airline function. I remember a few years ago SABRE (one of the 3 major GDS companies in the world) had a 4 hour outage (I worked for a division). Half the world's airlines stopped functioning. Generally these things seldom go down but when they do, hell breaks loose. Often these systems not only do reservations, bu…

Southwest was never on Sabre, per se. They had their own, separate reservation system, operated by Sabre the company, but not the main "Sabre Res System" / PSS. It was called SAAS, and sometimes "Cowboy". They moved off of that recently though, and are now on Amadeus/Altea.

Was true when I worked there, of course changed since then.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#206

Post by nasalgoat »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #194
justinclift wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it certainly sounds like you spammed them. :(

There is a distinction between spam email and a personalized targeted sales email. Mine was most definitely not spam.

I receive about 10-20 unsolicited sales emails a day that are "personalized", which I promptly delete.

If I am looking for a product, I will look for it. As far as I'm concerned, your emails are spam.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#207

Post by bitmapbrother »

I can't help but be amused of the fact that all of the money British Airways thought they saved, by outsourcing their IT, was just squandered by the additional expenses it's going to cost them to fix this mess. And I'm not even factoring in all of the money this bad PR is going to cost them in the near and long term.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#208

Post by spydum »

iaw wrote: post #127

I wish there was a listing of company IT quality somewhere similar to the list of 2Fac financial institutions. I'm leaving my citi card for a chase one due to poor infrastructure but I could have avoided a lot of wasted time if I hadn't opened it in the first place.

Problem is it's highly variable from engagement to engagement.

A lot of the quality and poor performance could be bad process/management on the clients side (though a outsourcing company will profit hugely from).

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#209

Post by dang »

matteo789 wrote: post #161
wetha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Krakow inherently better than say, Bangalore? Not snark, just asking.

Work ethic and the ability to say 'No'. Have you ever worked with the Indians, dude ??

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines.

National and racial slurs are not allowed here.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#210

Post by madeofpalk »

mancerayder wrote: post #63

In the tech-related (but now fully mainstream, unlike a few years ago) news these days, there are a number of recurring themes. 1. Massive security breaches affecting major corporations, governments, and so on. 2. Massive IT outages, affecting corporations, governments and so forth. It doesn't take a lot of incidents to mark them as 'massive' since things are strongly centralized in this world. Meanwhile, in the last…

> never have I seen such a strong push towards offshoring

As I've been working in the airline IT industry, I've observed that the reality is more nuanced.

Core booking and ticketing systems are 'outsourced' to solutions from Amadeus and Sabre. This makes sense not only for many strategic reasons (easier to have airline alliances when the airlines are all on the one system), but also because airlines are in the business of flying planes, not building ticketing systems.

Airlines are often full of loads of legacy and old systems which you just can't hire developers for (in the numbers, and costs, desired) - this is where Indian outsourcing firms come into the play and resolve the shortcomings. They're taking all the jobs and work that no one really wants to do anyway.

However airlines, and many other industries (banks come to mind), are realising that their digital offering is just as much, if not more, a core part of their offering and those are skills they need to bring in house and own if they want to be competent. I'm seeing more and more web and app developers be brought in house so airlines can establish these competencies. Digital/Product agencies are 'stepping in' in the meantime to help out (like Virgin America and Work & Co).

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