May 29, 2017
British Airways chief will not resign over IT failure chaos
British Airways chief executive Alex Cruz insisted he would not resign on Monday as he sought to draw a line under three days of chaos at the UK flag-carrier after IT problems left 75,000 passengers stranded. In the interview on Monday, he denied an outsourcing deal was to blame for the IT problems that hit on Saturday, causing the airline to cancel almost all its services over the busy weekend at the start of a week-long school holiday in the UK. "There was a power surge and there was a back-up system, which did not work at that particular point in time. It was restored after a few hours in terms of some hardware changes . . . we will make sure that it doesn't happen again," Mr Cruz said. BA has come under pressure from unions over its decision last year to outsource several hundred IT jobs to specialists supplied by India's Tata Consultancy Services. In a statement on Monday, Tata said: "As BA have already confirmed, the problems over the weekend were caused by a power supply issue and not due to outsourcing of IT services, so we can't comment further. BA and all their partners including TCS have been working very hard to restore the services fully". Mr Cruz has tried to stop his staff from talking publicly about the problems over the weekend.
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