As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off

Advance check-in is down too. If only there was a team that could fix it...

Updated The ba.com and britishairways.com websites and online check-in system for British Airways have been down for the past seven hours or so.

The UK's major airline says it has people "at work" fixing the cockup, but as of 1800 GMT no resolution is in sight and BA has not provided an explanation beyond "technical issues." A trip to the britishairways.com website returns the following message:

The message greeting BA visitors most of Tuesday

Meanwhile, BA marketing staff on Twitter are in damage control mode.

@eskimowoman Hi, we're experiencing technical problems with our website. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please try later, or our airport 1/2

— British Airways (@British_Airways) April 11, 2017

At this point, it is worth noting that many of the very people who would have been charged with promptly resolving technical problems on the British Airways web portal were laid off from their jobs just months ago.

In 2016, the airline said it would, by December, cut hundreds of workers from its software division in an effort to save on staffing costs. Some of the jobs went overseas to an outsourcer in India.

Some of those laid-off workers attempted to appeal to the UK Home Office following the announcement, but were unable to stop the cuts.

No doubt BA could probably use more than a few of those workers today, as passengers remain unable to check in or book flights online from an outage that now looks to be approaching the eight-hour mark. ®

Updated to add at 1900 UTC

After about eight and a half hours of downtime, the BA website is back. We're told a database upgrade overnight caused the outage.