Even if you take the excuse at face value (that someone hit the big red button) it still doesn't explain why their systems didn't failover to the backup Data Centre.
I find it unbelievable that BA would not have automated failover to a backup Data Centre since they are running 24x7x365 safety critical systems. The pertinent data should be replicated in real-time, so apart from a brief interruption, there shouldn't have even been any indication to the Users that anything happened.
Putting that to one side, they should still have been able to get things back up and running again pretty quickly. I would have expected BA to have pretty modern kit, so I would have thought the biggest risk would be from data corruption rather than hardware issues. Then it's just a case of restoring from backup - which is easy because you test that process on a regular basis
