BA’s disaster plan failed as soon as the smoke started coming out of its servers

The science of ‘disaster recovery planning’, together with the related art of ‘crisis PR’, is a core discipline of 21st-century management, both in the corporate world and for agencies of the state. Business schools teach it; consultants sell it; hospitals role play it; the Cabinet Office runs a college in Yorkshire devoted to it; every company board worth its salt has a risk committee demanding bulletproof evidence of it. So a disaster on the scale of the computer breakdown that caused much distress to British Airways passengers last weekend is not just unusual: it is completely bizarre, and nothing said by BA chief executive Alex Cruz has come close to explaining it.

So far we’ve been told that a ‘power surge’ zapped the airline’s data centre near Heathrow, though two local energy supply firms, SSE and UK Power Networks, deny any such surge came from them. BA’s back-up system then failed to activate, though we haven’t been told why or where it is located, or whether (as might be expected in a business so dependent on complex IT) there was a second back-up, in a third location, that also failed. GMB union officials weighed in to accuse the airline of making so many experienced managers redundant — their roles having been outsourced to India — that there was no one at HQ on a bank holiday weekend who knew how to handle the outage. But Cruz dismissed that while also swatting rumours of a cyber attack.

Meanwhile, BA’s ‘crisis PR’ was as unconvincing as its messaging to stranded passengers was incompetent; that aspect of the episode will become a classic business-school case study all of its own. We’ve been reminded that comparable if less comprehensive IT mishaps have befallen Delta and United Airlines in the US, as well as major businesses over here such as RBS and Capita, the outsourcing giant that provides IT services for many UK local authorities.