The outsourcing of British Airways jobs was not to blame for a “catastrophic” IT failure that brought the airline’s operations to a halt, its chief executive said.

BA was accused of greed after the GMB union suggested the disruption could have been prevented if the airline had not cut “hundreds of dedicated and loyal” IT staff and contracted the work to India in 2016.

But the airline’s chief executive, Alex Cruz, said this was not the case, adding a full investigation would be conducted into the failure which hit 75,000 passengers.

He said: “I can confirm all the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country. They have all been local issues around a local data centre which has been fixed by local resources

 “On Saturday morning there was indeed a power surge that had a catastrophic effect over some communications hardware, which eventually affected all the messaging across our systems.

“We will have completed an exhaustive investigation on exactly the reasons of why this happened.”

Mr Cruz apologised “profusely” for the hardship caused to customers and insisted a similar incident would never happen again.

Mick Rix, national officer for aviation at the union, said at the weekend: “This could have all been avoided. In 2016 BA made hundreds of dedicated and loyal IT staff redundant and outsourced the work to India.

“BA have made substantial profits for a number of years, and many viewed the company’s actions as just plain greedy.”