When Heathrow went down, they blamed the power supplier.

Heathrow’s outage was caused by an over-sensitive disaster recovery system, not a power loss, highlighting the risks of untested resilience and flawed infrastructure assumptions.

Published on 15 May 2025

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

1 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/NpLk02WHeMe

When Heathrow went down, they blamed the power supplier.

A fire at one substation, they said, caused the disruption. Convenient story. But it wasn’t true.

Heathrow gets power from three independent substations. Any one of them could run the airport solo. The real failure? Their internal “resilience” system kicked in when it saw a fluctuation—not a loss. And in its attempt to “protect” the infrastructure, it shut the entire thing down.

It took all day to reboot. Not because power was unavailable, but because their disaster recovery system was too sensitive to survive a real incident.

That’s what happens when resilience is theatre. Flashy systems. Fancy architecture. And no one asking the hard question: what actually happens when things get messy?

If you haven’t tested for chaos, you’ve only prepared for comfort.

Don’t confuse infrastructure spend with resilience. Resilience is what happens when your assumptions fail.

Also published on: LinkedIn

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