Work From Home Software Engineer Password Error became Travel Nightmare For 7 Lakh Travelers in Britain

In the last few years, the trend of work-from-home has increased rapidly in tech companies. However, many IT companies have also banned this. Last year, nearly seven lakh air passengers in Britain had to face problems due to an IT engineer’s password glitch.

NY Post’s Report According to the airline, the problem was triggered by a flight processing system breakdown on a bank holiday in August last year. Due to this, many flights had to be canceled and a large number of travelers were stranded at airports for hours. This problem was increased due to some engineers being on work-from-home that day. Investigation into the matter revealed that a major reason for the delay in resolving the issue was the difficulty in authenticating the password credentials of a work-from-home engineer.

This almost halted flight operations across the UK and National Air Traffic Services (NATS) arranged for a Level 2 engineer to be on call. It was a busy day and a Level 1 engineer in the NATS office began troubleshooting the system failure around 8:30 a.m. This engineer was not successful in this because the senior technical support engineer was working remotely. The senior engineer’s attempt to resolve the issue by logging into his computer was delayed because he was unable to gain access to the system due to difficulty with password authentication. After this, it took more than one and a half hour for the engineers to reach the airport but despite this they could not solve the problem quickly. This problem was completely resolved after about four hours. However, by then many flights had been disrupted due to software problems.

Because of this, airlines had to pay more than $126 million as compensation to the affected travelers. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had given 48 suggestions related to the policy after investigation. These included having senior engineers available on-site during busy periods.