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Sunday 28 May 2017

British Airways down

British Airways is down. All flights from anywhere to anywhere cancelled. And this is the start of the Whitsun bank holiday weekend, one of the worst possible times.

British Airways are blaming this on a "power supply outage". This is such complete balderdash that I can't help feeling that this is the first thing that popped into management's collective head.

So what really went wrong? Well, apart from the "power supply outage", there's also a few people speculating that it's a hacker/virus/worm/cyber-attack. I doubt it. Here's what I think.

BA outsourced their IT to Tata Consultants. Possibly the bean-counters didn't realise that some elements of a business are so important, they have to be done in-house, even when that costs more. I wonder if, right now, they still think that was a good idea?

I can't see "power supply outage", because A) you have UPSes (which last from 10 to 30 minutes), B) you have diesel generators, which give you an additional 24 hours coverage (and then you'll need to buy more diesel). and if IT is *so* important to your business that losing your IT service costs you bigly (for example, banks and airlines), then you have C) another data center, and a business continuity plan.

So if it really was a "power supply outage", then someone senior needs to be fired, because they didn't have A, B and C.

I don't think it was really a power supply issue.

But I have no idea what it was. Except that some pretty senior heads should roll.

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