“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
–1984
“It was not a failure of IT.”
-Willie Walsh
Willie Walsh, the chief of IAG (parent of company of British Airways) is blaming the media for exacerbating the fiasco last week colloquially known as BA’s great “IT Meltdown.”
No, no — it wasn’t actually a meltdown, reasons Walsh. Just a power failure.
Walsh is in Cancun for an IATA meeting this week.
During a press conference at the IATA AGM in Cancun, Walsh, who is chairman of the IATA board of governors, was asked about the “computer meltdown” at BA and immediately responded, “It wasn’t a computer meltdown.” He suggested the media had mischaracterized the incident.
Power to a BA data center was improperly disconnected, he explained. The problem could have been solved “within a couple of hours,” Walsh said, but the power was restarted in an “uncontrolled” manner that caused serious damage to BA’s servers, resulting in all of BA’s systems shutting down and aircraft having to be grounded across its network.
“It was not a failure of IT,” Walsh said. “It was a failure of power.” He called the episode an “extremely rare event … There are incidents from time to time that are damaging to our reputation, but we recover from these.”
But as One Mile At A Time reasons, if a single power outage can shut down an entire airline, isn’t that an IT failure?
I’ll answer his question. The answer is yes. BA can spin it, we can play a game of word semantics, but at the end of the day this was an IT meltdown. Sorry Uncle Willy.
CONCLUSION
Are we really to believe one power failure can cripple a massive global airline for two days? Does BA have no viable redundant power sources or backup systems in place?
Sadly, this is not just an IT failure, but a management failure as well.
BA has promised an investigation. I hope that it leads to changes in leadership as well as IT infrastructure. To be sure, the status quo is unacceptable.
> Read More: British Airways’ CEO Alex Cruz Should Resign
“Show me the f*cking IT failure”
Those quotes made me LOL for real.
What utility company is he holding responsible for the power failure? Which contractor did not install power backup systems properly? What law firm has been hired to pursue civil litigation? A lie requires more work to coordinate and sustain.
Willy has had an epic IQ failure.