British Airways?! I hardly think so.

No, this was neither incompetence nor a power failure. If anyone looks closely, they will find it to be an act of sabotage. But they might not publicly disclose it and they might not even want to look.

One day soon, our industry will become regulated, like most other industries (electrical, mechanical engineering,construction, low-voltage lighting ) that affect people's daily lives. You will have to have a government-issued license to work with software, and there will be multiple levels (apprentice, journeyman, master) as there are in most professions.

We will stop treating "people" as merely "workers" when we recognize just what people in IT can (and, if unsupervised, will) do. We will stop looking so rosily at "the happy little Cloud" as though it somehow didn't matter where in the world your data centers are.

Yes, our "take" on our industry will abruptly become much more mature. It's only a matter of time. And, only a matter of just how many disruptive events like this one will we tolerate before we do something meaningful about it.

In James Bond language, the government puts a D-notice
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-N...United_Kingdom ) on the affair since BA is TBF (too big to fail) so that we can all speculate and in the meanwhile, BA can go back to sleep without publishing the conclusions.

Next something for the conspirationistas (world domination perhaps)..HA HA
Tata consultancy is part of TATA SONS among whose other non Indian companies are CORUS (since divested back to British Government), JLR and Tetley Tea (largest tea company in UK and Canada and big in USA).

PS : Old money - TATAs were supported by ABN Amro, Rothschilds, and Deutsche Bank in their successful price war bid for buying CORUS.

OK

HA HA.

Isn't at the US military that still has some missile launch systems in obsolete systems?

OK

No. They use the right tools for the job from what I read about it.

BA, in contrast, is using stuff proven the hard way not to work. Yet BA is already steering the investigation away from the equipment itself. It'll drag on until most in the public have forgotten and the press has moved on, then there will be some quiet written equivalents of mumbling, probably about staff. Even if it really was an issue of having a single point of failure that could be taken out by a single power supply, an implausible situation, they are still unlikely to look into the human factors that arranged such a single point of failure.

There's an urban myth about a hospital intensive care ward where one bed was reputed to be unlucky. Whoever was put into that bed died. Finally they put in cctv to try and find out what was going on. A cleaner came in at 3:00 in the morning, unplugged one of the IC machines, plugged in her hoover and swept the ward. Then she unplugged the hoover, plugged in the IC machine again and left.

Not entirely unbelievable; I've actually worked in an office where that was happening ...

So have I.
It took us months to work out why the machine was going down at about 3AM every night when there was supposed to be no-one there.
This was at a (supposedly) highly secure installation that was working on military and cutting edge stuff.