Sophos Charters Boeing 737 To Rescue Staff

Tom Jowitt,

The travel fallout from the volcanic eruption in Iceland continues: Sophos resorted to chartering a plane to rescue stranded staff, while Easyjet’s website crashed

The travel disruption caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano continues to be felt, after security vendor Sophos hired a Boeing 737 to help rescue staff that were stuck overseas. Meanwhile Easyjet’s website suffered a number of hours outage to add to the confusion.

The Sophos Airlift

Earlier this week senior technology consultant Graham Cluley blogged that up to 600 Sophos staff from Australia, UK, and the US, were stuck in Berlin following a sales conference in the German city. Some workers had tried to head home by train but others were still stranded.

Cluley revealed that some Sophos staffers managed to get back to the UK via coach, ferries and trains, but that there was still plenty of his colleagues from further afield stuck on the continent. The stranded American salesforce apparently set up a temporary base at Sophos’s offices in Oberursel, Germany in order to continue working.

But it seems that Sophos has gone to the expense of chartering an aeroplane to fly these staffers home. “We’ve hired a Boeing 737 to help get our staff from America, Australia and Asia Pacific back to their homes,” wrote Cluley.

The chartered jet plane has left Portland, Oregon, and is flying to Europe, bringing a number of Dutch staff who were in the US, back to Europe. “Once it arrives at Vienna airport, the plan is for around 140 Sophos workers to board it and – after a fuel-stop in France – bring them to Boston, and allow onward travellers the opportunity to finally return to their own countries,” Cluley said.

Easyjet Website Problems

Meanwhile the travel problems were not helped after Easyjet’s website briefly crashed on Wednesday afternoon, with travellers complaining of outages for a few hours. The website was back up and running as of 3pm GMT.

Easyjet did not respond to eWEEK Europe UK at the time of writing, but the airline had been planning on operating 900 flights or 86 percent of its network Wednesday.

British airspace was reopened for business on Tuesday evening and British Airways said it was hoping to operate all longhaul flights from Heathrow and Gatwick as normal Wednesday.