by Donald Wood
Last updated: 11:50 AM ET, Fri June 2, 2017
The string of flight cancellations by British Airways at some of England's largest airports last weekend was reportedly caused by a contractor doing maintenance work at one of the carrier's data centers.
According to Reuters, the worker accidentally switched off the power supply to the British Airways computer systems, shutting the system down and leaving 75,000 people stranded at airports such as Heathrow and Gatwick.
The technical issues caused chaos at impacted airports throughout the weekend and carried into Monday.
Officials from the airline said affected passengers will be eligible for refunds on expenses such as hotels, ground transportation and meals.
Reports from the Times newspaper quoting a British Airways source revealed that the power supply unit blamed for the IT failure was inadvertently shut down by the contractor. Investigators believe human error will be deemed the cause of the outage and not equipment failure, as previously reported.
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Initially, the airline blamed a power surge as the shutdown cause for its computer systems, flight operations, call centers and website.
In total, the incident will end up costing British Airways between $102 million and $138 million for compensating passengers, refunds, additional staffing and lost revenue, according to CNN Money.
While the British Airways outage was devastating to the company, it is not expected to hurt the carrier's bottom line fiscally. As seen with other major outages for airlines such as Delta and Southwest, the companies rebounded and the same is expected for British Airways.
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