Are British Airways Reaping What They Sowed?

[barney15c]

Massive IT breakdown causing mass huge delays and disruption to passengers.
Although their systems has been prone to glitches for years, i read somewhere that BA despite advice to the contrary it would be a massively detrimental move to outsource their IT.
I read an article that said that talks were going on with TATA Consultancy (I am presuming part of the massive Indian conglomerate) to take over the work for substantially less than the costs of running the department with their own in-house staff.
I believe RBS ran their IT from India too when they had a massive technical failure a few years ago that was highly disruptive
Its all very good cutting costs but i would imagine corners were massively cut keep the contract to budget.
So If the BA IT contract was outsourced to india was it a disaster waiting to happen?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/ba_tata_consultancy_service/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/ba_tata_consultancy_service/

[barney15c]

BTW BA blatantly lied this morning when the disruption first took hold. They said that there was routine maintenance going on. Who in their right mind would be doing that during the day on one of the busiest periods of the season. They were trying to cover their backs and failing spectacularly.
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[webbo3]

the company i use to work for outsourced their I.T side of the business to TATA, but all the call centres were in the uk, we had the odd problem but nothing serious..


Dave.

[Zacs-Master]

(I think Barney has a bit of a chip on his shoulder regarding BA.....must have had a couple of hours delay or summink)

[jno]

ZM, I remember waiting 24 hours for a BA flight, which the airline said was caused during some problems in refuelling on landing. It later turned out the plane had been having engine trouble on the outbound flight and it was nothing to do with refuelling. So yes, barney's right, they lie.

sj, who knows much more than me, made the same point as barney on another thread: this is most likely caused by outsourcing their IT.

[Zacs-Master]

All airlines lie. All airlines have IT problems (admittedly not on this scale).

[jno]

maybe. I don't have all-airline data, just enough to suggest barney has a point.

The last fight I had problems with was EasyJet, with conflicting reports coming through about the cause of a delay. The ground staff got so annoyed about it they hauled the captain in to tell us straight, which he did, and everyone was happy. Always good policy. Plus we got EU-mandated compensation without a whimper.

[Zacs-Master]

Barney makes no point whatsoever. He (she?) speculates that outsourcing IT might be a disaster waiting to happen when a disaster has already happened. One could equally postulate that this might not have happened had IT already have been outsourced. Both arguments are fatuous.

[mikey4444]

It must be complete and utter chaos at the airports !

[Zacs-Master]

Do you think so!?

[barney15c]

ZM - unions said that BA , making 900 IT professionals redundant in the UK and replacing them at much reduced cost with an outsourced Indian company was a BAD idea, and that has come to pass. I bet any cost savings they made doing this will be negated with the huge financial costs this fiasco is going to cost them. Happened to RBS too. My personal opinion is pay peanuts get monkeys.

[Islay]

Do BA transferring the it and call centres to India to save money annoyed the unions - well what would the unions like BA do? Keep a going that is losing money handover fist?
Loads of companies have done what BA have done - who can blame them?

[Old_Geezer]

Unsure I understand. Surely they had standby kit at a different location running in tandem that automatically takes over if something develops a fault ? No board of directors can be that bad that they take no interest and just collect the salary then go play golf ?

[Old_Geezer]

I suspect the unions would like jobs not exported abroad but done in house where quality is assured. No point failing on the cheap.

[Electrochem]

I find it unbelievable that there is no contingency plan. There is far too much reliance on technology these days. How did we cope in the days before computers and mobile 'phones?

[mikey4444]

I understand that this is due to a power outage, somewhere in their system. If that is true, its completely unacceptable that a major company like BA can be brought to a stand still.

Ruddy disgraceful.

[jno]

Electrochem, I believe in those days passengers were all required to pedal to help get the plane off the ground.

[Mamyalynne]

Everyone had spare elastic bands and strong garters.

[AZardoz]

It might be because of this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/picture-galleries/9131272/Huge-solar-flare-to-hit-Earth-as-the-Sun-erupts.html
In NA we've been hit with numerous comm outages. This morning all the Wi-Fi nodes disappeared from my PC. I thought it was my machine -- just passed the 1 year mark, so out of warranty. ;-)
Later everything came back but we're not out of the woods yet.

[vetuste_ennemi]

Physical systems have fail-safe provisions: backup and bypass etc. The failure of a node in a network does not cause chaos: it is skipped or rerouted.
If you lose data (for whatever reason), or the controlling software is compromised (by bugs or cyber attacks), then you can't do business for a while.

[vetuste_ennemi]

So this is not a "somebody pulled the plug out" case.

Something wrong with the software.