Aer Lingus shutdown caused by fibre-optic rupture at UK building site

Aer Lingus has confirmed that last weekend’s IT systems outage which led to the cancellation of more than 50 of its flights in and out of Dublin Airport was caused by construction workers hitting a fibre-optic cable in the UK.

The airline has a contract with a cloud services provider to host the network on its core operations IT system. The cloud provider is hosted by a UK internet service provider (ISP). Aer Lingus says “unrelated construction work” hit one of the ISP’s cables, knocking out Aer Lingus’s “core operational and customer system” for 10 hours until the cable was repaired at 5.30pm last Saturday.

A back-up system should have kicked in to keep its systems online, says the airline. However, “a component failed in the back-up”.

Outage compensation

“This should not have happened and our supplier has apologised,” said Aer Lingus. When asked if it would seek compensation from the company involved, the airline responded that it was currently “engaging with the supplier regarding the consequences of the outage”.

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The outage prevented Aer Lingus from accessing any information on bookings and customer contact details. It was also unable to process check-in or boarding of passengers or access flight data, it says, forcing the flight cancellations. “Key processes for our contact centre, website and digital applications were also unavailable,” it said.

The outage caused severe disruption at Dublin Airport last Saturday, with extensive queues at the terminal and passengers unable to contact the airline. Many passengers complained they received conflicting information about whether their flights were going ahead or not. Some passengers due to return to Dublin were also stranded abroad.

The airline’s chief executive, Lynne Embleton, has apologised to customers for the disruption and says “we are processing refunds as quickly as we can”.