British Airways disruption continues into second day as IT failure prompts flight cancellations
Some British Airways flights remain grounded, with a "small number" of short-haul trips cancelled after mass disruption to the airlines IT system.
The airline cancelled all short-haul flights from Heathrow until midday on Saturday, with the airport’s online departure board showing further BA cancelations throughout the day.
BA said the problem, which was also expected to cause potential delays for its customers using Gatwick and London City Airport, is related to a hardware issue and is not because of a cyber attack.
Hundreds queued at airports as delays dragged into Saturday afternoon, with some saying they were running late for holidays after waiting for years to go abroad due to pandemic cancellations.
While the airlines says most flights will take off as planned, some will be called off.
"Our teams have worked around the clock to resolve the technical issues we’ve experienced, and the vast majority of our flights today are due to operate as planned," BA said in a statement.
"Unfortunately, with some of our crew and aircraft out of position as a result of the weekend’s disruption, we’ve regrettably had to cancel a small number of short-haul flights.
"We’ve been in touch with affected customers to apologise and offer them the choice of a refund or to rebook onto another service.
"We’re asking customers due to travel with us today to check ba.com for the latest flight information before they leave for the airport and to check-in online if possible."
The major outage caused cancellations and delays of flights, pile-ups of luggage and passengers stuck on planes after landing at Heathrow.
Has this happened before?
It is BA’s second outage in 10 days and the latest of several high-profile IT incidents to hit the airline.
Last summer, BA settled a legal claim over a major data breach that affected 420,000 customers and staff.
The breach in 2018 included the leaking of names, addresses and card payment details and led to the Information Commissioner’s Office handing out a fine of £20 million.
On July 18 2018, computer problems hit BA operations at Heathrow and the airline cancelled a number of short-haul flights after the incident involving a “supplier IT system”.
In May 2017, 75,000 bank holiday travellers were stranded after a glitch forced the airline to cancel nearly 726 flights over three days.
The outage was suspected to have been caused by human error after an engineer disconnected and then reconnected a power supply to the data centre in an “uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion”.
The meltdown was blamed by some on aggressive cost-cutting and outsourcing of jobs.