Stranded in Portugal for a week?

[InOffice]

My boss was due back form holiday yesterday, but is apparently now stranded until Saturday.

It doesn't really matter, we'll be fine without her, but is it really that bad?!

Maybe, but vaguely informed guess doing the rounds from those with a background in both ATC and IT is it was most likely a combination of an unusual/incorrect element of a flight plan message and a legacy IT system….

Funny how it keeps happening on school holiday peak times with little or no public investigative reporting. Russian hacking is what I'm hearing whispers of. They'd never tell us anyway.

I think the last major UK ATC IT related incident was 9 years ago - the report is in the public domain:

https://www.caa.co.uk/media/r42hircd/nats-system-failure-12-12-14-independent-enquiry-final-report-2-0-1.pdf

Never ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

The BA computer outage in May was the latest in a series of such problems at the airline.

I mean, hacking is not impossible as a cause, but inadequate resourcing, training and testing, and just errors, in complex systems are even more likely.

I'm sorry for your friend, but this did make me laugh.