Many BA Flights cancelled after IT systems failure

marno21

duskyjoe wrote: »

I'm sure the odd few but EIN themselves are packed to the rafters long haul these days

Even from SNN?

Charles Babbage

PaulKK wrote: »

Management don't want to pay for something they can't see/understand, usually that simple really.

When IT come looking for money to implement the latest engineering best practices, its a hard sell to simply say reliability or security for example would be much improved.

IT is often just seen as a cost. Hence the outsourcing reference made above.

It shouldn't be that hard. How much has this cost BA directly? What is the effect of people talking about them on boards such as this all over the world.

TallGlass

Seems once a year now a big company gets a massive whack of IT relatity.

Charles Babbage

£100m worth, and the Delta incident should have been a warning
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/28/british-airways-faces-100m-compensation-bill-over-it-meltdown

I'll bet you there will still be no action against the suits that led to this underinvestment, but they'll be all over the IT dept.

Irish Steve

And I will put money on it that one of the reasons for this shambles is that all the senior (expensive) IT specialists who had years of experience at running the systems on a day to day basis will have been outsourced for a fraction of their cost, and the people that replaced them are most likely people who on paper have "computer qualifications", but in reality have zero experience in the day to day running of critical systems that have to work 24/7, so when they have to put together a disaster recovery plan, they won't have a clue about what fall back communications links, or resilient redundancy and the like are, so when (as has clearly happened this weekend) the fertiliser hits the fan so hard that the fan stops, the people who have to pick up the pieces will have been running around like headless chickens all protesting "it wasn't my fault", and looking for non existent managers to tell them what to do, and how to do it, but that level of management is no longer there or accessible.

And yes, I spent over 40 years working in the computer industry, and have first hand experience of dealing with disaster recovery, and I've had to try and persuade director level management that didn't understand the risks on why I wouldn't compromise on certain (expensive) things that were in the specification for new systems, it wasn't easy, but it had to be done, for the sake of the ongoing secure operation of the companies concerned.

Clearly, some of the people in BA were unwilling or unable to fight their corners, with the results that we're seeing at the moment. I'd love to be a fly on the wall of some of the discussions that will be happening over the next few days.

mcsaddle

back on schedule, almost

JCX BXC

marno21 wrote: »

Even from SNN?

Yup, as are the 3 other airlines who operate to the US from Shannon, they wouldn't be operating the flights otherwise.

flanzer

Stinks in my opinion

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/30/ba_ceo_blames_messaging_and_networks_for_grounding/

I see he's trying to strengthen his case for outsourcing by putting this out there

“All the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved with any type of outsourcing in any foreign country,” he said [Reg emphasis]. “They have all been local issues around a local data centre who has been managed and fixed by local resources.”

Brennans Row

Does British Airways' explanation stack up? (BBC)

Having worked with IBM midrange platforms for 30 years I can’t imagine a database needing more than a few hours to rebuild itself after an abnormal shutdown.