British Airways points to human error for May flight outage
British Airways CEO says an engineer mistakenly disconneted, and then reconnected, the power, causing the IT system to crash
London — The head of the parent company of British Airways (BA) has indicated that its computer crash, which sparked global flight chaos late last month, may have been caused by human error. Some 75,000 passengers were affected by the computer system outage that caused chaotic scenes during the final weekend of May at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Willie Walsh, CEO of International Airlines Group, suggested that an engineer disconnected and then reconnected a power supply to the data centre in "an uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion". "You could make a mistake in disconnecting the power — it’s difficult for me to understand how you can mistakenly reconnect the power," Walsh told an industry conference in Mexico, according to comments published by The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday. He also vowed that an independent investigation would be carried out. Walsh said "physical damage to the servers and distribution panels" was caused, making it difficult for BA to overcome the p...
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