That minutes-long power glitch? It's going to cost British Airways £80m, IAG investors told The massive IT systems failure caused by a power surge at British Airways' primary data centre will cost the airline £80m. Willie Walsh, the chief executive of BA's parent body International Airlines Group, issued the news to a roomful of investors at the company's AGM this afternoon. The systems crash on the morning of May …
"despite major operational problems, by May 29 it was able to fly the vast majority of its planned schedule"
Of course for all those caught up in it it meant that 100% of their flights failed to run on their planned schedule. It's far easier to put a positive spin on things if you ignore the effects on the victims.
"emphasised that the failure "had absolutely nothing to do with changes to the way we resource our IT systems and services"."
It might not have had anything to do with the _cause_ of the outage, but what effect did it have on the time required to recover the service into a sufficiently functioning state to resume operations? The outage lasted 3 days. Would it likely have been substantially shorter with more skilled staff closer to the problem?
Earlier this week, it was revealed that BA plans to outsource call centre management to Capita.
The agreement, which is yet to be finalised, will see 1,000 workers sent to Capita in a transfer of undertaking protection of employment (TUPE).
Capita don't have a great reputation for providing good quality service. So BA are going to transfer more of their staff (who will probably quit as soon as they are able) and so have even less staff capable, able and willing to deal with issues.
I just have this feeling that this is not going to end well for anyone.
DR prevention plan and testing = £100K
No DR prevention plan and testing = £100m
If IAG and BA can't work out those numbers why are they in business and why do they still have the same management?
I suppose their next cost saving measure will equal £100m so as to balance the books. Perhaps their creditors should be applying some due diligence before it happens again and they lose their investment.
Came here to say this
We all know the PPPPPP..... If an engineer unplugging a power cable (Cliche, I know) and plugging it back again caused the outage, then resiliency, or the lack of it is the underlying problem.
However, the lack of DR is much more worrying...
No DR prevention plan and testing = £100m
NOTE: I'm going to presume that the £80m value was done correctly (no creative accounting involved).
£80m is a value BA could probably claim, partially, from insurance. So here's the reality of having a DR site:
1. How often does an issue EXACTLY like what just happened is going to happen?
2. How much does it cost to run a fully redundant DR site annually?
Now which has a lower figure? Option 1 or Option 2? The answer is, most likely, Option 1.
Because of this, BA will not be implementing a DR in the foreseeable future.
Well their insurance costs will rocket - possibly become unaffordable unless they can demonstrate measures to improve resilience and DR. Secondly, their reputation is suffering badly - they are protected, for the moment, by their historical status and position (i.e. owning slots at Heathrow) - the reputation loss must be damaging in both the medium and long term, I am not aware the 80M covers that?
-WTF???
....."You could cause a mistake to disconnect the power - it's difficult for me to understand how you can mistakenly reconnect the power".....
-WTF???
Could have swore BA was a global airline... Surely there were 10 other global data-centers to take over? Its a feeble response. Just seems like Willie Walsh is out of his depth. BA/IAG too busy outsourcing rest of IT!
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