The damage was caused by unrelated construction work, and the cable remain unrepaired until 17:30.

Almost a week after a chaotic IT outage resulted in the cancelation of more than 50 flights, Aer Lingus has finished investigating the cause. In an email to affected customers, Chief Executive Officer Lynne Embleton revealed that it was due to damage caused to a fiber optic cable during construction work.

The IT meltdown happened on September 10th, starting at around 09:00, as Aer Lingus was experiencing significant connectivity issues that resulted in severe disruptions for its check-in and boarding processes. The airline's website and mobile application were also rendered unusable due to the disruptive connection.

Without the ability to properly communicate with passengers and carry out standard operating procedures, Aer Lingus canceled all Dublin-originating flights departing for Europe and the UK. The decision to proceed with the cancelations was made just after 14:00, but several of the morning flights had already accumulated into piles of delay.

And before the official cancelations, passengers on the affected flights had already been queueing for several hours at the check-in counters, as the IT outage meant the procedures had to be conducted manually. However, airline personnel were not adequately trained in manual check-in operations, and passengers could not be rebooked immediately, given that all of the airline's systems were effectively down.

Given all the chaos that happened that unfortunate Saturday, it might be hard to believe that such an extensive IT outage was due to a damaged fiber optic cable. In her email, Embleton once again apologized to the affected passengers and offered an explanation for Saturday's events, saying:

"Aer Lingus has a contract with a leading cloud services provider to host the network and infrastructure behind our core operations and customer system. Their internet service provider in the UK had a major failure in their network when, early on Saturday morning, unrelated construction work damaged one of their fiber optic cables which provides the connection to our systems."

According to Embleton, the damaged cable was not repaired until 17:30, when Aer Lingus systems finally started to come back online. Still, several affected passengers had questioned why there weren't any backups for such situations, albeit there were. Unfortunately, the backups also failed due to a non-functioning component, disallowing the backup to kick in and support the disrupted systems when it should have.

And when ending her email, Embleton reassures Aer Lingus' passengers that such a scenario is unlikely to happen again, as she went on by saying:

"This should not have happened, and our supplier has apologized for the break in the main connection and the failure in the backup. Both have now been fixed, and measures have been put in place to prevent an outage of this type from happening again."

Even with the explanatory email from Embleton, the affected passengers from last Saturday's IT outage were still dissatisfied with the outcome after having been thoroughly disappointed during the process itself. During the manual check-in processes, several impacted passengers complained about the lack of customer service and communication from the Aer Lingus personnel.

And as of currently, those affected are still saying that Aer Lingus hasn't been highly communicative about missing baggage and compensation issues. Especially on the topic of compensation and refunds, because several of the impacted passengers managed to rebook their flights, albeit on separate carriers such as Ryanair.

However, they reported that Aer Lingus would only offer refunds and no compensations since they chose to rebook on a different carrier. As to why they did not rebook with Aer Lingus, passengers have stated that they weren't technically given the option either since their flights were rescheduled for later that day once the systems returned.

With some passengers in a desperate time crunch and Aer Lingus unable to provide an accurate timeline of when the IT outage would have resumed last week, the only option left for these passengers was to rebook with a different carrier to get to their destination quicker. Still, Aer Lingus says that passengers can try opting for a refund, and its customer care team will process them as efficiently as possible, which is something the affected passengers hope to be the case.

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Journalist - Charlotte is currently pursuing a full-time undergraduate degree majoring in Aviation Business Administration and minoring in Air Traffic Management. Charlotte previously wrote for AirlineGeeks. Based in Singapore.

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