BA worker claims airline ignored job cuts warning
ABRITISH Airways computer worker has accused the company of ignoring warnings about outsourcing work and cutting jobs over the past year.
Speaking after an IT shutdown left 75,000 bank holiday travellers stranded, he said Heathrow had been hit by power outages in the past, but BA’s system was always resilient enough to be protected.
The GMB union called on BA to halt any further job cuts and to bring IT work back in-house from India.
Bill Francis, head of group IT at BA’s owner International Airlines Group (IAG), has sent an email to staff saying an investigation so far had found that an Uninterruptible Power Supply to a core data centre at Heathrow was over-ridden on Saturday morning.
He said: “This resulted in the total immediate loss of power to the facility, bypassing the backup generators and batteries. This in turn meant that the controlled contingency migration to other facilities could not be applied.
“After a few minutes of this shutdown of power, it was turned back on in an unplanned and uncontrolled fashion, which created physical damage to the system, and significantly exacerbated the problem.
“This was entirely a problem relating to the power supply. It was not an IT failure, and there were no software issues.
“The fix consisted of physically replacing servers that had been damaged, then bringing all of BA’s 700-plus applications back online in a controlled fashion while ensuring that all data was consistent across the system. All of the systems are now back up and running.”
The BA worker, who did not want to be named, told the Press Association that 600 IT jobs had been lost since March last year, with work being outsourced to India.
The worker said: “We have been warning that to rip out the knowledge and experience from what is a very complex IT estate would have serious consequences in terms of long-term maintenance of the system, as well as any recovery from any hiccups.”
Mick Rix, national officer of the GMB, said: “We are calling on IAG to stop any further redundancies and offshoring of work currently done by BA IT staff.”