Britain’s flagship carrier, British Airways has suffered a flight grounding IT outage causing chaos at airports globally. Initially thought to be a cyberattack this theory has now been debunked by the airlines CEO Alex Cruz, who has now admitted the issue is in fact a problem with the power supply.
Much like the public services supplier Capita who suffered an equally as embarrassing power outage earlier in the week, BA have a vast amount of servers located in hundreds of server cabinets spread over 6 data halls in two sites close to its Heathrow headquarters.
A multitude of things could have gone wrong, so we shan’t dive into all of them however typically a datacentre (such as the one 52Degrees operates from, more info available here) will be fed power by at least 2 power grid sectors, have multiple backup generators and independent UPS systems all feeding servers via separate A + B power distribution.
Do BA have this level of power resilience? Was the second site mentioned their DR site and if so why did failover not take place? Who knows, at this point we can only speculate. However it does it home the fact that if your business is as reliant on IT as BA, a remote DR site as well as regularly tested failover and a robust backup plan is a must.
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