Aer Lingus shutdown caused by fibre-optic rupture at UK building site

Aer Lingus has confirmed that last weekend’s IT systems outage which led to the cancellation of more than 50 of its flights in and out of Dublin Airport was caused by construction workers hitting a fibre-optic cable in the UK. The airline has a contract with a cloud services provider to host the network on its core operations IT system. The cloud provider is hosted by a UK internet service provider (ISP). Aer Lingus says “unrelated construction work” hit one of the ISP’s cables, knocking out Aer Lingus’s “core operational and customer system” for 10 hours until the cable was repaired at 5.30pm last Saturday. A back-up system should have kicked in to keep its systems online, says the airline. However, “a component failed in the back-up”. “This should not have happened and our supplier has apologised,” said Aer Lingus. When asked if it would seek compensation from the company involved, the airline responded that it was currently “engaging with the supplier regarding the consequences of the outage”.<br/>