Firstly, I don't have a dog in this fight as don't work for or have shares in BA. I do work for a competitor but have no desire to see BA uneccesssarily punished, if for no other reason than good friends of mine work there. What I do have is my stake in British business, the business that will have to exist for my children to have a job. So that's my interest.
So what went on? I'll happily buy that part of BA's IT infrastructure was taken down by an internal power failure and more damage was done when it was restored. But what I don't believe is that only a power failure caused this mess. This mess was a direct result of incompetence by BA's IT department. An IT system is a collection of hardware, software and infrastructure ordered to receive, process an deliver data. The data handling process is there to support the company. And as the company changes the way it does business, any system modifications have to be designed, built and tested beforehand. BA clearly haven't done this. Instead, they have disposed of in-house talent as their system has grown and placed the future if the company in jeopardy, exactly the place where it is today. An organisation saving system patch can not be written in a few days, so BA is still very vulnerable.
BA's problems are in the greedy and uncaring way it does business. It appoints grasping, greedy sociopaths without background experience to run highly sophisticated operations and as a result have ripped out the skill, expertise and more importantly the heart of BA. Turning a profit is one thing but doing so day after day, week after week without a heart will not work. Firstly, you won't keep your good employees, after all why should they care about working for a company who cares nothing for them. Secondly, you won't keep your customers. They have been lied and cheated out of their flights and they won't take much more. The edge that BA had was a quality product delivered by professional caring staff. But that has gone. BA have screwed up over the past few years by placing greedy incompetent managers in positions they weren't qualified to be in. Worse, they have outsourced the guts of the organisation to the third world and they are now at the mercy of people who don't care about BA who work on a different continent.
This should not only be BA's wake up call but the wake up call to all of British business. You are on the wrong track. Squeezing the last few quid out of a company might look good in the short term but in the long term there will be nothing left. No heart, no company, no jobs and no society.
ps. Apologies to the professional BA staff who still work there. I know how you feel. When the heart and soul of a company you work and care for gets ripped out it takes some getting used to.