BA passengers hit by second day of global fallout from IT failure
BA passengers around the world were struck by a second day of cancellations and delays on Sunday as the airline struggled to regain control after a computer system failure caused chaos during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the UK. Nearly a third of BA flights departing from Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, had been cancelled by Sunday afternoon, while inbound fights from destinations such as New York and Austin, Texas, were also scrapped, leaving passengers stranded. Aviation experts predicted the disruption would spill over into the week as BA fought to recover from the major IT crash, which forced it to cancel all flights out of London on Saturday. It was one of the worst IT failures to strike a global airline. Last year when Delta Air Lines suffered a similar outage. 2,300 flights were cancelled and delays took three days to clear. “Coming after a spate of other issues, the bad PR and potential reputational aftermath will probably hit future revenues” at BA, which is part of the IAG airlines group, said Damian Brewer, analyst at RBC Capital Markets. BA had been hoping to resume a “near normal” service out of Gatwick airport Sunday and operate a “majority” of scheduled flights from Heathrow but passengers at the latter reported lengthy queues and over-crowding. Passengers at Heathrow were forced to wait outside terminal buildings until 90 minutes before their flight was due to depart, as airport and airline staff desperately sought to deal with the congestion. Alex Cruz, chief executive of BA, blamed the IT meltdown on a “power supply issue” but the carrier would not provide further details on why all of its systems, including back-up systems, had failed. It said on Sunday that many of its IT systems were “back up today and we are doing all we can to restore our flight programme”. Bill Curtis, senior vice-president at IT analytics firm CAST, questioned why a back-up system had not kicked in. “It [the back-up system] should have been on a different power supply with a replicated database. You would usually lose a few transactions but not the entire operation of the airline,” Curtis said.<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2017-05-29/oneworld/ba-passengers-hit-by-second-day-of-global-fallout-from-it-failure
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BA passengers hit by second day of global fallout from IT failure
BA passengers around the world were struck by a second day of cancellations and delays on Sunday as the airline struggled to regain control after a computer system failure caused chaos during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the UK. Nearly a third of BA flights departing from Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, had been cancelled by Sunday afternoon, while inbound fights from destinations such as New York and Austin, Texas, were also scrapped, leaving passengers stranded. Aviation experts predicted the disruption would spill over into the week as BA fought to recover from the major IT crash, which forced it to cancel all flights out of London on Saturday. It was one of the worst IT failures to strike a global airline. Last year when Delta Air Lines suffered a similar outage. 2,300 flights were cancelled and delays took three days to clear. “Coming after a spate of other issues, the bad PR and potential reputational aftermath will probably hit future revenues” at BA, which is part of the IAG airlines group, said Damian Brewer, analyst at RBC Capital Markets. BA had been hoping to resume a “near normal” service out of Gatwick airport Sunday and operate a “majority” of scheduled flights from Heathrow but passengers at the latter reported lengthy queues and over-crowding. Passengers at Heathrow were forced to wait outside terminal buildings until 90 minutes before their flight was due to depart, as airport and airline staff desperately sought to deal with the congestion. Alex Cruz, chief executive of BA, blamed the IT meltdown on a “power supply issue” but the carrier would not provide further details on why all of its systems, including back-up systems, had failed. It said on Sunday that many of its IT systems were “back up today and we are doing all we can to restore our flight programme”. Bill Curtis, senior vice-president at IT analytics firm CAST, questioned why a back-up system had not kicked in. “It [the back-up system] should have been on a different power supply with a replicated database. You would usually lose a few transactions but not the entire operation of the airline,” Curtis said.<br/>
