BA blames bank holiday IT outage on technician pulling the plug

IT contractor blamed for causing BA chaos by, literally, pulling out a plug in the data centre

British Airways has attributed its 'global IT outage' over the bank holiday weekend at the end of May to "human error", claiming that the data centre was sent into meltdown after an IT engineer pulled the plug - and caused more damage when he hurriedly plugged it back in again.

The ensuing IT meltdown caused 75,000 passengers to be stranded around the world, as flights were cancelled and delayed as a consequence.

A BA employee last week revealed to The Times that a bumbling IT contractor, who was attempting to complete work at a British Airways data centre, shut down a power supply unit which had otherwise been working normally.

BA, which originally insisted that a power failure was to blame for the global outage, on Monday confirmed that a fat-fingered staffer was the cause of the chaos.

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA's holding company International Airlines Group (IAG), said this week that the actions of an engineer who disconnected and then reconnected a power supply to the data centre in "an uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion" was the problem, noting that this caused "physical damage to the servers and distribution panels".

If this was not the case, Walsh said that BA could have quickly recovered from the power outage.

"That in itself was a problem that we could have overcome probably in a couple of hours, I don't think it would have led to any cancellations," he said.

Walsh said that the engineer was authorised to be in the data centre, but was not authorised "to do what he did".

He added: "It's very clear to me that you can make a mistake in disconnecting the power.

"It's difficult for me to understand how to make a mistake in reconnecting the power."

While the outage has been blamed on "human error", IT staff at BA have suggested that airline's ageing data centre suffered from overheating for some years, with air conditioning equipment struggling to keep temperatures down and staff even resorting to hosing the roof of the building during particularly hot spells.

Walsh, speaking at the International Air Transport Association global summit in Mexico this week, asserted that the system meltdown "was not a failure of IT" and denied that cost-cutting was even partly to blame.