Case study 8.2 British Airways loses IT

British Airways (BA) used to be called 'the world's favourite airline'. Not any more. On 27 May 2017, a worldwide systems failure grounded all BA flights. Check-in desks at London's Heathrow and Gatwick and other airports around the world were unable to access passenger details. In London 470 flights were cancelled on 27 May and a further 183 the following day, with many more flights stranded around the world. Tens of thousands of passengers were left standing around for hours with no information, until being told to 'come back tomorrow'. BA airport staff seemed unprepared for the huge numbers of stranded passengers. BA websites and inquiry operators had little information, other than that all flights had been cancelled. Passenger baggage piled up and did not reach the owners for days. Compensation claims for delays and lost baggage were estimated at over 100 million. The reputational loss to BA was immeasurable. Although some immediately thought this must be a cyber-attack, it was not. BA's initial explanation for the systems breakdown was loss of power to servers on the central reservation system. Other systems reliant on access to passenger data, including the flight loading system and the baggage handling system, then shut down. IT experts suggested that, with such sophisticated systems, BA must have included back-up power supplies. Indeed they had, but it emerged that the power had failed totally because a maintenance worker had turned it off. The back-up systems, a generator, and batteries were working perfectly. Then, once power was restored, efforts to re-boot the systems were bungled. Some BA ex-employees, who had been laid off as a result of a head office cost-cutting drive, suggested that the heart of the problem was a decision to outsource IT work to an Indian company. 'The BA system is a legacy system that has evolved over generations of equipment and software changes,' they said. 'The inter-relatedness of the systems and the complexity of the data is immense. BA needed people who had grown up with the system. This is not the first time the system has failed this year.'11 BA denied this suggestion. British Airways, once the country's flag-carrier, is now a subsidiary of the International Airline Group (IAG), a Spanish company which also owns Iberia, the Spanish airline. IAG's shares had risen significantly in the previous year and suffered only a small fall following the BA systems saga. The CEO of IAG, Willie Walsh (who had previously headed BA), did not appear during the crisis, leaving the situation to be handled by BA's CEO, Alex Cruz. They were both criticized for delays in offering explanations or apologies. An official raised a storm by suggesting that passengers would receive full refunds on their tickets, but BA would not pay for the cost of missed connecting flights, alternative travel arrangements, or accommodation. Subsequently, BA apologized to its customers and commissioned an independent inquiry. The British airlines' regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, was also called on to examine the case. At the previous AGM of IAG, shareholders had received a letter from a corporate governance advisory group that 'the board should consider bolstering the IT experience of its non-executive cohort: only one of the serving non-executive directors has IT experience'.

Discussion questions

1. Who was responsible for this debacle?

2. How might such a situation have been avoided?