The rumour here in the UK, about the British Airways systems failures, was that they had disbanded a existing, long standing team, in favour of outsourcing the work to India ("a spokeswoman from India's Tata Consulting Services (TCS) told El Reg: "As BA has already confirmed, the problems over the weekend were caused by a power supply issue and not due to outsourcing of IT services, so we can't comment further. BA and all its partners including TCS have been working very hard to restore the services fully." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/02/british_airways_data_centre_configuration/).  This is quite common over herein the UK.  I like to think that it's not just justifying our own jobs to say that it normally results in a less professional service with communication issues (it seems to be hard for those contractors to admit they don't understand the code or requirements and can take a long while for such issues to get back to the UK team).  In our experience (myself, my husband, and nearly 30 years as developers) the outsourced services then return in-house, at least until there's a new company secretary who adds up the IT salaries and then the whole cycle starts again...  Hopefully this helps explain some of the issues around the outage.