A few PR thoughts on the BA system outage

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Arabmoney says:

  30 May30 May 09:45

  I work in the IT industry and have heard through the grapevine a couple years ago the BA IT systems were a mess and was a disaster waiting to happen.

  My take on it, is that it was most definitely a hardware failure, probably due to some power surge or cut. Many services most likely depended on the services running on this hardware to function, which would have meant they would have to go through the pain of restoring a backup of the service running on that hardware, which could take days depending. until then well…

• Jamie P says:

  30 May30 May 09:46

  I could agree more with your article. Although not personally affected by the events over the weekend, just reading the numerous stories angers me greatly.
  A minority felt that the removal of amuse bouche and flower in F was the final straw, god knows what those with flexible travel policies feel regarding their loyalty to BA now.

• Tony says:

  30 May30 May 09:59

  Strange thing happened with our household Avios over the weekend [Blue at the time but achieved Bronze this weekend], and not that I’m complaining, in that our return CW flights to BKK were originally attracting household Avios earnings of circa 35k but the re-booking that I made on Sunday morning looks like it has attracted the Business flexible rate of nearly circa 30k each way and this is backed up by our household balance increase.

  • Cheshire Pete says:

    30 May30 May 10:07

    This probably correct. Previously a Domestic MAN to LHR in Economy had to be rebooked due to a cancelled flight and the new flight was the then Business UK class attracting higher earnings.

    • Stu N says:

      30 May30 May 11:51

      I’ve had that as well, cheap Club Europe was rebooked into flexible after weather disruption. Seems to be one of those things that they haven’t stopped doing yet, suspect it’s just “one of those things” that is actually in customer’s favour.

• Lili says:

  30 May30 May 10:07

  Fully agree about the complete HR fiasco.
  As for root cause. As an IT engineer I honestly *truly* cannot believe that their mission critical system was so ill prepared for an outage. There are ways to make system so robust that you’d have to have simultaneous attacks in multiple physical locations to take it down. Obviously you have to have good engineers to design such system – not the cheapest resources you can get. Also, even with legacy systems good engineers will think on the spot because they understand deeply how the system works. They’ll come up with workarounds. But for this you need to know what you’re doing. Outsourced resources usually can only follow previously written script so if that exact scenario hasn’t happened before – bad luck. Sadly, I see that in a number of places and always it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. It’s just some companies have more luck than BA had this time.
  One thing I can say for sure, after witnessing a couple of meltdowns and rescuing a live system, is that this kind of blunder takes a number of issues to come together at the same time. If it was *just* some sort of power outage, it’s likely they would have recovered more gracefully. There must have been more that they are not saying.

  • Mark says:

    30 May30 May 10:14

    I agree. The Flight Status functions on the BA website and iPhone app were not working at 09:00 London local time, so I guess that there was already a problem in progress at that time. The “power surge” could have been unfortunate – or could it have occurred as a result of an attempt to fix the initial problem by restarting something?

• JamesW says:

  30 May30 May 10:11

  One of the very common perceptions people have of a ‘full service airline’ vs a ‘low cost carrier’ is that where they really stand apart is in their responce when something goes wrong.
  People pretty much expect to have to sort themselves out if a LCC has a major problem and don’t have much of an expectation of support from the company. However one reason I hear cited a lot is that a ‘proper airline’ like BA will come into its own when it has problems and will do everything it can to support you and get you where you need to be.
  As you say, everyone understands companies can’t have massive amounts of spare capacity and staff just sitting around for a rare event like this, but everyone does expect BA to treat its passengers better than this.
  There will be A LOT of people for whom flying is an occasional ‘treat’ and not like most of us on here, a bit of a preoccupation. It is those masses who have the perception that they are paying more to fly with a company like BA on the few occasions a year they do because if something goes wrong they will be treated with decency and be helped in everyway possible to minimise their disruption.
  BA have shown the masses that this is now certainly not the case and this will have a very large impact upon how very normal people view the company and their own willingness to pay more to fly with BA than any of the other brands.

  BA’s response to this has shown very publicly to the masses who don’t keep a keen eye on airline news & developments that BA has been penny pinching to the extent of a LCC whilst simply charging a premium for its past glories and peoples now very outdated percetion of it.
  The outage will cost them serious millions but I’d be willing to wager that their response to it will over the next couple of decades prove to have been far more costly as the average joe no longer thinks to himself “This is our one family holiday a year, I’d rather have the security of knowing I’m travelling with BA rather than a LCC as BA will make sure my whole family holiday isn’t ruined & they’ll go out of their way to help us if they have a major problem”.

  BA has properly screwed up here.
  This should hurt them more than beating up a doctor has hurt a competitor.

• JohnNi says:

  30 May30 May 10:13

  Slightly O/T but related.
  Looking for some advice, our flight to BHD was cancelled on route to LHR we rang BA and was put on a code share fight with Aer Lingus for the next day. Within minutes the was reflected in MMB. The next day we arrived only to be told at check in that it was not on the Aer Lingus system and to go to BA customer relations desk , BA then put us on a later flight with Aer Lingus some 8 hours after the flight we had been given.My question is apart from the initial EU claim can I claim a second EU compensation for the 2nd delay. Thanks in advance.

• Anna says:

  30 May30 May 10:14

  I was on a (full) Ryanair flight to Lanzarote last year which was diverted to Fuerteventura due to high winds. Although it took an extra 8 hours to get to our original destination, within 2 hours of landing in Fuerteventura, Ryanair had arranged coaches to the ferry port, ferry tickets across to Lanzarote and further coaches waiting at the other end to get us to Lanzarote airport. All this as evening fell on a relatively remote foreign island in a country not known for its helpfulness and co-operation. Communications weren’t great but they got the job done, unlike BA in their home operating base!

  • Leo says:

    30 May30 May 14:31

    I’m not apologising for BA here – but that’s comparing apples and oranges. The scale of the two problems – one diverted plane and a systemwide IT failure are simply not comparable. That said BA’s attitude towards compensation so far is deplorable.

• David Mill says:

  30 May30 May 10:16

  Alex Cruz wearing a high-viz vest inside a building looked like a right idiot!! He looked like he should have been loading the bags onto the plane! What an absolute mess by BA. Alex needs to go, ever since he came, airline has been going downhill. Its only a matter of time till BA go down the toilet.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.