British Airways Flight Outage: Engineer Pulled Wrong Plug

British Airways pointed to human error as the cause for mass flight cancellations that grounded at least 75,000 passengers last month and led the carrier’s passenger traffic to decline 1.8 percent.

An engineer had disconnected a power supply at a data center near London’s Heathrow airport, causing a surge that resulted in major damage when it was reconnected, Willie Walsh, chief executive officer of parent IAG SA, told reporters in Mexico. The incident led BA’s information technology systems to crash, causing hundreds of flights to be scrapped over three days as the airline re-established its communications.