We believe the root cause was a power supply issue."
My employer had back up generators in the basement. Power supplies issues just made the lights flicker....
The simple explanation for BA's plight is that ... they failed to understand the downside of outsourcing.
When I worked for a global megacorp it had back up generators, & for major IT systems a back up data centre geographically separate from the main one, i.e. far enough away for it to be unlikely that a single disaster would affect both. Critical systems were behind locked doors & power supplies to 'em were protected so nobody could knock 'em down by casually pulling out a plug.
Never found out if it'd all work, though. I recall a power cut causing the lights in our office to flicker & calls of "has anything failed?", all answered by "X (Y, Z, etc.) is working" but that was just development systems.
We had issues with outsourcing, though. I recall a mega-worldcorp external supplier's big show of how their replacement billing system, carefully customised for us after exhaustive & expensive studies by hordes of supposedly world-leading consultants & analysts, would replace some, & interface with other, existing systems. A bunch of us stood looking in puzzlement at a big diagram supposedly showing everything until one of us voiced what we were all thinking, i.e. "where's so-and-so?", so-and-so being a system without which (or a replacement) we wouldn't produce any bills.
Many months of work, walking past us to their desks every day, but it had never occurred to them to ask us (the billing team) what we did & how it fitted in.
I also recall how when it was decided to replace the last part of an old system running on old hardware which wasn't doing very much any more, but the little it was doing was essential, lavishly illustrated external proposals galore were put forward by external suppliers, all of which involved great expense - & none of which, as far as those of us working on it could see, took into account quite how little a replacement needed to do. They were all far too complicated, & involved duplication of processing that was done in other systems, & holding the same data in multiple databases. One consisted of emulating the old hardware (which getting away from was one of the main benefits of replacement, since it eliminated the need for separate copies of data, expensive licences for an old mainframe OS & other old software which was being milked before it went out of use, etc.) on new hardware & porting everything across.
It was quite a struggle to get an internal replacement to even get looked at. There was no allocation of time to investigate one until a low-level manager sneaked in some cover for the best person to look at an internal replacement so he could draw up a proper proposal. It was adopted (a no-brainer once it was actually compared with the external offers), implemented by existing staff & IIRC one contractor (only needed because one person had been made redundant to meet a headcount reduction target
- another person complained that the contractor was asking him questions that he used to ask the redundant person, i.e. me) faster than any of the external proposals & saved the company a fortune. As soon as it went live there were redundancies in the team that had done it, including the bloke who'd drawn up the proposal & thus saved the firm a few million. The perfect reward,eh?