According to statements given to various media outlets, the IT problems were caused by a power surge on Saturday morning at around 9.30am. Cruz claimed the surge had a “catastrophic effect” on some communication hardware which affected messaging across the airline’s system. He said tens of millions of messages every day are shared across the BA network's 200 systems and all systems were affected.

The BA chief then said the airline was then “unable to restore and use some of those backup systems because they themselves could not trust the messaging that had to take place amongst them”.

He went on to say neither an outsourcing of jobs or a cyber-attack were the source of the problem and everyone working with this particular hardware were "locally hired". Mr Cruz has not said who he believes was responsible for the failure or whether BA employees were involved, however, some reported ‘experts’ have questioned the statement about the power surge with some electricity companies reporting to such issues on their networks.

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Related: British Airways boss Alex Cruz explains what went wrong in catastrophic IT meltdown