British Airways’ outage, like most data center outages, was caused by humans
An IT outage on May 27 that caused British Airways (BA) to cancel more than 400 flights and strand 75,000 passengers in one day was because of human error—and a simple one at that.
An engineer had disconnected a power supply at a data center near London’s Heathrow airport, and when it was reconnected, it caused a surge of power that resulted in major damage, according to Willie Walsh, CEO of BA’s parent company IAG SA. Walsh made the comment to reporters in Mexico, and it was picked up by Bloomberg and other news outlets.
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The engineer in question had been authorized to be on site and was part of a team working at the Heathrow data center hit by the power outage. The facility is managed by CBRE Works Solutions, a U.S. property services company.
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