British Airways boss Alex Cruz has refused to resign after an IT system failure led to cancellations and delays for 75,000 passengers over the bank holiday weekend.
The company, which is owned by International Consolidated Airlines Group (LON:IAG), is facing a bill of at least £100mln in compensation, additional customer care and lost business resulting from the IT meltdown that affected more than 1,000 flights.
The airline’s flights from Heathrow and Gatwick were grounded on Saturday, leaving passengers stranded. Passengers were also stuck overseas as services around the world were affected.
Services resumed on Sunday but cancellations and delays continued. Flights largely returned to normal on Monday though British Airways was working through a backlog of passengers stranded by the weekend’s cancellations.
British Airways boss apologises...
Cruz said he was “profusely apologetic” for the computing glitch, which was caused by a power surge on Saturday morning.
However, he said he would not step down over the incident.
“I don’t think it would make much use for me to resign at this particular point in time,” he told reporters yesterday.
“I’m working very closely with my team to make sure, again, that we work on the rest of the disrupted passengers to make sure that we address all of their needs.”
Cruz, who was head of fellow IAG-owned Vueling before replacing Keith Williams as chief executive of British Airways in April 2016, said the airline would conduct an exhaustive investigation and will make sure that it never happens again.
Alex Cruz denies cost cutting measures led to IT meltdown...
Cruz rebuffed suggestions from the GMB union that his cost cutting measures, including outsouring IT roles to India, had left the company vulnerable to system failures.
“I can confirm that all the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country. They have all been local issues around a local data centre who has been managed and fixed by local resources,” he said.
Mick Rix, GMB’s transportation lead, accused Cruz of talking nonsense and criticised the management team for its slow public response to the crisis.
Rix said five members of the equipment and facilities team based in the centre near Heathrow that houses the mainframes had been made redundant.
“We believe that the redundancies that have already taken place have led to a brain drain... [this] has led to issues like this taking place that cannot be resolved quickly,” Rix said.
He added that customer facing staff were “obviously quite distressed at the way they are being left to pick up the pieces for the untold misery that’s being caused to passengers”.