Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
I think it's more a case of staff failing to draw passengers' attention to the fact than an 0800 number had been set up to handle rebooking and information calls.
One thing I can’t understand in this scenario is that it was reported that everything went down for hours last Saturday, even PA in Terminal 5. That may not be true. Surely a good IT architecture is one like most ATC where flight data, voice, radar, planning etc. are on separate servers and networks. Thus if one server and its backup goes down you have some picture of what is happening from the others. It may not enable full ops but you have some capability.
Thus if BA check-in or baggage goes down at least the supervisor should have a working screen derived for a different server/network on which management can issue messages to staff who can relay it to the public in the terminals with PA or whiteboards. Thus the 0800 number can be disseminated along with "sit there because we can't check in anyone for a while". And the BA.com site could be redirected to a completely different site outside the BA server cluster that gave simple messages like the 0800 number, rather than just showing a 404 error message.