Reports from Air France sources to some av blogs suggest a pretty dramatic set of failures.

First, the autopilot disconnects (could be due to turbulence), timed within a minute or two of when analysis of the plane's track shows the plane hitting a rapidly growing area of multiple convective cells.

THen other electrical stuff including short circuts, and within a few minutes there are alerts indicating that primary air data computers, the backup instruments, and then the primary flight control computers and the secondary flight control computers, all dropped out.

And around then or a bit later, an alert for rapid rate of change in cabin pressure.

May well be a lot more but that's pretty scary right there.

If indeed they'd lost both the electronic instruments and flight control computers, the A330 was basically an unguided missile. There is some mechanical backup, but limited and unwieldy enough that it probably wouldn't be enough to fly through inclement weather -- basically meant to keep it straight and level in normal flight until you can get MS Windows for Airliners to reboot.

Before blaming this on computer controlled aircraft, there's obviously a lot more to figure out in terms of whether those alerts were valid, and whether damage / wx conditions were such that loss of computers was just one of several fatal problems developing at once.