Ms Lynne Embleton:

I thank the committee for the invitation to attend this meeting to give the committee an update on what happened on 10 September when we had a systems outage that significantly impacted Aer Lingus operational and customer systems. It is important to state that major IT issues causing significant disruption to our customers have not been typical in Aer Lingus. This case was truly exceptional. We have had very few customer-facing IT outages over the last five years, and nothing on the scale or with the impact that was experienced on Saturday, 10 September 2022, but we did face significant issues on that date. For almost ten hours, we had no access to our core operational and customer systems. We could not check in or board customers, access mandatory flight information, access data on customer bookings or access customer contact information. This meant we had very limited ability to communicate with our customers and provide the service and information we know they needed.

What caused the issue that weekend? Aer Lingus has a contract with a leading cloud services provider to host the network and infrastructure behind our core operational and customer system. Its Internet services provider in the UK had a major failure in its network on that day. Early that Saturday morning, unrelated construction works damaged one of the fibre optic cables which provided connection to our systems. The cable was not repaired until 5.30 p.m. that day. The damage occurred just after 8 a.m. but it was not until 5.30 p.m. that our systems began to come back online. The key question we asked our supplier was what happened to the backup, which should have kicked in and supported our systems and avoided the impact that we saw. The answer to that question was that, unfortunately, a component in the backup system also failed that day. This should not have happened and was exceptional in nature. The two issues were unrelated. Our supplier has apologised for both the break in the main connection and for the failure in the backup. Both have now been fixed and measures have been put in place which should prevent an outage of this type ever happening again.

We are very conscious of the impact that this disruption had on our customers. Our people at Aer Lingus made huge efforts on the day to look after customers in what were very difficult circumstances. I apologise again to our customers and thank our staff as their efforts made a real difference in helping to reduce the impact of the outage on our customers. We increased the number of call centre agents available to support our customers. However, due to the scale of the disruption, call wait times were inevitably longer in the immediate aftermath of the outage. Hotel accommodation was offered to our customers at most airports and those who secured their own accommodation are being reimbursed accordingly. We added extra resources to rebook customers and reunite them with their bags and we have been processing applications for refunds, expenses and compensation.

Aer Lingus has sincerely apologised for the severe disruption caused. We have written directly to our customers about the system outage and its impacts and also thanked them for their patience and understanding over the course of the disruption. I hope this statement gives members of the committee context and I am happy to take questions from them.