Monday, May 29, 2017

British Airlines Creates Global Travel Chaos ... Because of a Power Failure? How 70s - Science


Passengers wait at a British Airways check-in desk after the airport suffered an IT systems failure, at London''s Gatwick Airport, Saturday, May 27, 2017. British Airways canceled all flights from London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports Saturday as a global IT failure caused severe disruption for travelers on a busy holiday weekend. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP)

Phys.org:  BA outage creates London travel chaos; power issue blamed

There isn't a competent large scale IT organization in the world which doesn't have its power sources backed-up every way from Sunday and tests on a regular basis the ability to shift with absolute transparency from one to the other.

You will need to get deep into the article to get past meaningless tourist blather to find any mention of systemic problems.

And after years of rapid consolidation in the business, these computer systems may be a hodgepodge of parts of varying ages and from different merger partners, all layered on top of each other.

A union official, meanwhile, blamed BA cost cutting for the travel chaos, saying the airline had laid off hundreds of IT staff last year and outsourced the work to India.

"This could have all been avoided," said Mick Rix, national officer for aviation at the GMB union.

- PO

Watson:  it's the Law of Evolutionary Potential

Precisely so, Watson.  I'm glad I had the foresight to make you Detective.

Watson:  I'll be (cough) indebted for life


When you allow yourself to become strangled by your infrastructure, there's only one outcome.  I ga-ro-tee, there's not a large-scale mainframe bot which isn't smirking about a power failure.  BA, a power failure?  Really?

Sherman:  where are we going, Doctor Peabody?

Dr Peabody:  back to the 70s, Sherman, back to when they didn't do much for backup power support either.


There's a similar situation with nuclear waste storage in America since it's all over the place at the different reactor sites and, what do you know, they cannot or will not maintain the infrastructure and it leaks.

Yes, Watson, that's another example of the future for America being curtailed by the Law of Evolutionary Potential.

Watson:  I knew that

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