IAG's Walsh defends BA's response to outage, still looking into cause: BBC

[June 01, 2017]  LONDON (Reuters) - The chief executive of British Airways owner IAG said that an investigation into a power outage at a data center which left 75,000 people stranded over a holiday weekend would take time, and defended the response of BA's management to the fiasco.

People wait with their luggage at the British Airways check in desks at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London, Britain May 28, 2017. REUTERS/Neil Hall

Willie Walsh has kept out of the media spotlight since the outage, where hundreds of flights were canceled at Heathrow, Europe's biggest airport, and Gatwick, with British Airways chief executive Alex Cruz leading the response to the crisis.

British Airways are trying to investigate the cause of a power surge which caused damage to IT infrastructure in a center near London's Heathrow and also overwhelmed its back-up system.

Walsh apologized to customers that had been affected and defended Cruz's response to the outage, adding that the investigation into why the outage happened was continuing.

"We know what happened but we're still investigating why it happened and that investigation will take some time," Walsh told the BBC. "The team at British Airways did everything they could in the circumstances to recover the operation as quickly as they could."

(Reporting by Alistair Smout and Elisabeth O'Leary; editing by William James)

[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.