An effortless way to piss people off is to cut off the electricity: case in point, the British Airways IT fiasco that ruined countless travelers’ plans was allegedly caused by a contractor who flipped the switch down on the power supply. Chaos occurred when British Airways’ two main data centers lost juice and an uncontrolled reboot of the system shut down the entire IT system, resulting in the loss of all information about flights, baggage and passengers.



A maintenance worker may have accidentally switched off the power supply at the center of the British Airway’s IT failure which caused chaos for 75,000 passengers, it has been claimed. The investigation into the fiasco is likely to focus on human error rather than any equipment failure, according to The Times, after an internal investigation found that the power supply was working correctly. A BA source told the newspaper that it was rumored that a contractor doing maintenance inadvertently switched the supply off. This has not been confirmed.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – British Airways IT Outage Supposedly Caused by Contractor Switching off Power