BA’s disaster plan failed as soon as the smoke started coming out of its servers

The science of ‘disaster recovery planning’, together with the related art of ‘crisis PR’, is a core discipline of 21st-century management, both in the corporate world and for agencies of the state. Business schools teach it; consultants sell it; hospitals role play it; the Cabinet Office runs a college in Yorkshire devoted to it; every company board worth its salt has a risk committee demanding bulletproof evidence of it. So a disaster on the scale of the computer breakdown that caused much distress to British Airways passengers last weekend is not just unusual: it is completely bizarre, and nothing said by BA chief executive Alex Cruz has come close to explaining it.

So far we’ve been told that a ‘power surge’ zapped the airline’s data centre near Heathrow, though two local energy supply firms, SSE and UK Power Networks, deny any such surge came from them. BA’s back-up system then failed to activate, though we haven’t been told why or where it is located, or whether (as might be expected in a business so dependent on complex IT) there was a second back-up, in a third location, that also failed.