British Airways has ordered an independent inquiry into the computer chaos that stranded tens of thousands of passengers over the bank holiday weekend and could cost the airline £150 million.
Willie Walsh, chief executive of IAG, BA’s parent company, said that he had commissioned a study to look into the shutdown of a data centre that knocked out IT systems and left 75,000 travellers with no or delayed flights. It is believed that the mistakes of an engineer may have caused a “power surge” which brought down the airline’s networks.
The fiasco escalated as travellers complained that they had been left out of pocket by BA’s offers of alternative travel or accommodation.
Speaking at the annual meeting in Mexico of the International Air Transport Association, Mr Walsh said the loss of power could have been resolved within hours and without cancellations had the engineer not restored power in “an uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion”, physically damaging servers at a data centre.
“You could cause a mistake to disconnect the power, it’s difficult for me to understand how you can mistakenly reconnect the power,” he said.
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“We have commissioned an independent company to conduct a full investigation. It will be peer reviewed and we will be happy to disclose details,” Mr Walsh added.
Excuses for the computer outage, which also include IT systems dating back to the 1970s, have piled pressure on the tarnished reputations of both BA and Mr Walsh. An influential investor advisory group has sharply criticised IAG and Mr Walsh for not having enough IT expertise at board level.
The computer glitch was at least the fourth big outage to have affected BA passengers in the past ten months. Last July, Mr Walsh and Alex Cruz, the airline’s chief executive, said that they knew they had an IT issue.
Glass Lewis, a corporate advisory group, said that IAG had to act. In a letter before IAG’s annual meeting next week, it said: “We believe the board should consider bolstering the IT experience of its non-executive cohort . . . only one of the serving non-executive directors has IT experience.”
Mr Walsh admitted that communication with passengers had been poor but denied the fiasco would damage BA’s longterm standing. “It’s damaged us, but it hasn’t destroyed us in any way. We’ve recovered from worse,” he said.
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Willie Walsh, chief executive of IAG, BA’s parent company, said that he had commissioned a study to look into the shutdown of a data centre that knocked out IT systems and left 75,000 travellers with no or delayed flights.
The fiasco escalated as travellers complained that they had been left out of pocket by BA’s offers of alternative travel or accommodation.
Speaking at the annual meeting in Mexico of the International Air Transport Association, Mr Walsh said: “We have commissioned an independent company to conduct a full investigation. It will be peer reviewed and we will be happy to disclose details.”
Excuses for the computer outage, including a mysterious power surge and IT systems dating back to the 1970s, have piled pressure on the tarnished reputations of both BA and Mr Walsh. An influential investor advisory group has sharply criticised IAG and Mr Walsh for not having enough IT expertise at board level.
The computer glitch was at least the fourth big outage to have affected BA passengers in the past ten months. Last July, Mr Walsh and Alex Cruz, the airline’s chief executive, said that they knew they had an IT issue.
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Glass Lewis, a corporate advisory group, said that IAG had to act. In a letter before IAG’s annual meeting next week, it said: “We believe the board should consider bolstering the IT experience of its non-executive cohort . . . only one of the serving non-executive directors has IT experience.”