Blog.

BA IT Failure

June 26th, 2017

 

British Airways IT Failure – A Lesson In Cyber Risk

In recent weeks, there was a system failure that lead to a standstill of aircraft from BA (British Airways), the IT failures resulted in over 75,000 of its passengers stranded in foreign countries and unable to go on holidays and even business trips. This highlights the real-world risk to all businesses should systems fail as a result of a cyber attack.

The failure resulted in over 700 flights being cancelled. It has since been estimated that the failure is going to cost approximately £80million to compensate all passengers as well as unmeasurable financial losses from reputational damage.

It was reported by BA that the failure occurred due to a human error. The Failure occurred at a crucial time for the business on a bank holiday meaning that many people with short weekend getaways were unable to go and as a result, thousands of disgruntled passengers were left with a hole in their pockets. A hole that BA are going to expected to fill in order to salvage any pride and avoid further reputational damage.

More and More Businesses Are At Risk From Cyber Crime

BA isn’t the first business to be struck down by a system failure and they will definitely not be the last. There have been numerous high-profile incidents whereby large business has lost systems resorting in business losses. It has become so common that big businesses pay to have an external IT support whose responsibility it is to ensure the upkeep of their systems.

Playstation and Coca Cola Have Suffered From Cyber Crime

Other system failures that have caused damage to business include; the loss of the PlayStation Network, a Hack meant that users were left without access it was also then discovered that the hackers were trying to gain access to the payment details of some of the accounts. Coca- Cola had their IT system hacked in 2009, the breach occurred after a senior official opened a malicious link in an email the installed keyword loggers and other malware. In June 2012 RBS were hit by a computer glitch that meant accounts were affected for up to 2 weeks when a software update didn’t work correctly.

As you can see this isn’t the first time that a major company has issues with its IT, for BA now it is about how they recover as they cannot allow this incident to affect their plans moving forward, but by the same token cannot simply ignore what has happened and will need to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Back to article