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Updated at 4.30pm
BRITISH AIRWAYS CANCELLED all its flights out of major London airports Heathrow and Gatwick after an IT systems failure, leaving hundreds stranded.
“We have experienced a major IT system failure that is causing very severe disruption to our flight operations worldwide,” BA said in an early afternoon statement.
BA flights out of Heathrow and Gatwick were initially cancelled until 6pm, but the airline later said there would be no flights for the rest of the day.
It said it had found “no evidence that it’s a cyberattack”, with Britain still recovering from a ransomware attack that crippled key infrastructure earlier this month.
“We are working hard to get our customers who were due to fly today onto the next available flights over the course of the rest of the weekend,” BA said, adding that its call centres and website were also affected.
The outage comes on a busy holiday weekend in Britain, where Monday is a public holiday and many schoolchildren are beginning their half-term break.
BA warned people not to come to the “extremely congested” airports, but an AFP photographer at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 said many travellers were waiting outside the departure area with their luggage in “chaotic” scenes.
They were not being allowed inside the terminal for health and safety reasons, prompting some of them to take taxis away from the transport hub.
‘Calm despite chaos’
Travellers wrote on Twitter that they were unable to check in or use the airline’s app, while others said they had been left stranded on the tarmac.
“None of your staff know what the heck is going on. Nor do your passengers. Can we have some info please? Chaos here,” tweeted Chris Ship, Royal Editor for ITV News, to BA.
One passenger, Julie Adie, wrote that she had been stuck on the runway for an hour without an offer of drinks.
Another Twitter user called Jo called it a “terrorist’s dream”, writing that “people getting off plane with/without luggage. Some staying on”.
BA said that those unable to fly would be offered a full refund, warning that some delays and disruption could continue into tomorrow.
“Most long-haul flights due to land in London tomorrow are expected to arrive as normal, and we are working to restore our services from tomorrow,” the company said.
Delays were reported in other European cities including Rome, Prague, Milan, Stockholm and Malaga.
Inside Heathrow’s Terminal 5, Luke Hallard wrote that “everyone remarkably calm despite British Airways chaos, but wait until the lounge runs out of booze”.
Alma Saffari told the BBC that her flight from Marseille to London had been grounded.
“When we finally boarded the captain came out and told us their computer systems were down worldwide,” she said.
Eventually after sitting on the tarmac for one and a half hours we disembarked the plane.
Now we are sitting in the departure area outside the gate.
Some users suggested that the blackout was caused by a bolt of lightning:
The company said it was “extremely sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers during this busy holiday period”.
The airline has suffered other IT glitches recently, leading to severe delays for passengers in July and September last year.
With reporting from Gráinne Ní Aodha
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Oh great. Now we’ll be hearing from all the armchair experts with blindingly simple solutions that the programmers didn’t think of because they were too busy eating their liga and colouring in with their crayons. I can’t wait.
@8bitplebian: I don’t eat liga when I’m coding lol
@Scorpionvenomm: Sorry, Farley’s.
They should turn it off and on again
“British Airways HAVE apologised to ITS customers…”
@Harry Whitehead: British Airways is the name of the company, singular. The airways themselves haven’t actually apologised.
If you are going to be pedantic, at least be right.
@Michael Doyle: If British Airways is to be treated as a singular noun, the correct verbal agreement would be HAS, not HAVE. Try reading it again.
@Harry Whitehead: Exactly. That’s why your original correction was incorrect.
My heads hurt.
@Neal Ireland Hello.: Err…mine wasn’t a correction. I was directly quoting the article. I used capitals to highlight the mistake. Either ‘has + its’ or ‘have + their’.
@Harry Whitehead: Lol, show how much the Irish care about the stranded passengers
@Harry Whitehead: maybe the article has been fixed since you read it first. Further down I do see “British Airways say” , which is conflicting.
@Michael Doyle: Yeah you’re right, it’s been fixed.
@Harry Whitehead: That explains it. Now we can get back to worrying about the group of passengers that are/is stranded.
@Michael Doyle: *WORRY WORRY WORRY WORRY WORRY WORRY WORRY…*
@Michael Doyle: Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I’m glad we got to the bottom of this, gentlemen.
There’s some good deals in pc world, maybe they should get down there
Resilience and redundancy plans anyone??
Probably cloud-based….
Look up its an empty sky.
go back to old system with ticketing, technology is weak, all it takes is one system to go down and the hole lot falls down, flights delayed, or cancelled no good to people travelling or missing connecting flights! then they dump you outside the airport to fend for yourself!
@Stephen Finn:
There is a whole lot wrong with that suggestion.
@Nick Allen: and yet you aren’t arsed pointing out exactly what is wrong with it.
I think you will find they were hacked, but not admitting to the fact. It seems impossible that they would have no redundancy or contingency plan if a data centre was struck by lightning.
Hugo Drax involvement I’ll warrant .
The cancellations also hit flights to Heathrow and Gatwick, I’m in Miami and two flights from here today were cancelled. The staff on the desks said nine flights from New York were also cancelled, they were still suffering a lot of computer glitches while trying to transfer us to alternative flights with different airlines. I was in a queue for about 90 minutes and it then took about another 20 minutes for the desk agent to convince his computer to book me onto a new flight.
I somehow read the hashtag as ‘competence outage’.
Word on the street is the Indians screwed up!!!!!!
have your say