The Independent (August 25)
On Sunday, British Airways should have been celebrating 100 years of flight, instead BA was experiencing “one of the worst weekends in its 21st-century history.” When the Pilots’ Association called three days of strikes, “the airline told tens of thousands of passengers that their flights were cancelled–only to admit many of the messages were sent in error” because the wrong date range was used in sending the alerts.
Tags: BA, Cancelled, Date, Error, Flights, Passengers, Pilots’ Association, Strikes, Wrong
Reuters (July 8)
“Europe’s data police have new fangs that are turning out to be pretty sharp. British Airways was told on Monday it faced a 183 million pound penalty for the theft of customer information from its website last year.” The record hacking fine did reward BA for coming forward and owning up to the breech. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) the penalty could have been up to “4% of global revenue. Yet the fine announced by the ICO amounts to 1.5% of British Airways’ 2017 sales.”
Tags: BA, Customer information, Data, EU, GDPR, Hacking fine, Penalty, Record, Revenue, Theft, Website
The Economist (June 3)
“It is the fourth time in a year that BA’s computer systems have suffered a major crash. And debilitating IT breakdowns are becoming increasingly common” across an industry with particularly high IT demands. “The sheer quantity and complexity of the data they handle make airlines particularly vulnerable to IT disasters.” And yet, “in 2015 airlines spent 2.7% of their revenues on IT, half the norm across all industries and a lower share even than hotels.” The pressure to pressure to cut costs is strong, given the industry’s harsh competition. The cost of an IT melt down, however, is much greater. Airlines must “refrain from pruning investment in IT too far.”
Tags: Airlines, BA, Complexity, Computer, Crash, Data, Investment, IT, Quantity, Systems
