British Airways (BA) suffered a major IT failure last Saturday on its Heathrow and Gatwick airports. The flights at two of London’s biggest airports were cancelled due to BA’s decision to outsource IT jobs to India in 2016, said the airline’s trade union.
According to The Guardian, the trade union blamed BA’ decision to outsource hundreds of IT jobs to India for its recent failure on Saturday.
Trade Union Warned The Airline
The airline laid off hundreds of IT staff last year and outsourced the jobs to India to cut costs. National Officer for Aviation at the GMB union, Michael Rix says that this all could have been avoided. The union had warned BA against this last year on February 29, 2016.
British Airways had to cancel all of their flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports in London on Saturday. The reason cited was a major IT failure that caused a global disruption in the airline’s operations. The terminals at the two airports became extremely congested due to this problem.
WannaCry?
Earlier it was speculated that the BA terminals had been hacked in a string of recent WannaCry ransomware attacks. Chief Executive of the airline, Alex Cruz said,
We believe the root cause was a power-supply issue and we have no evidence of any cyber attack.
The system crash affected the booking system, baggage handling, mobile phone apps and check-in desks which left passengers confused and waiting in long queues with planes held up on runways. More than 1,000 flights were affected due to the crash. At Heathrow, BA had 406 flights scheduled for departure on Saturday, with another 71 at Gatwick according to flightstats.com.
via HuffPost
