IT glitch forces British Airways to delay, cancel flights

An IT crisis has grounded a couple of hundred British Airways flights and delayed another 100 and more as the airline was forced to resort to manual check-ins.

Andrew MacAskill and Paul Sandle had the news for Reuters:

Problems with British Airways’ IT systems left thousands of passengers facing flight cancellations, delays and long queues at airports in the airline’s third major computer failure in a little more than two years.

Wednesday’s woes are the latest in a string of problems at the airline, which was fined $230 million last month for a huge customer data breach and is bracing for potential strikes in a pay dispute with its pilots.

BA, owned by International Airlines Group (ICAG.L), apologized to customers for Wednesday’s disruption and said its technical team was working to resolve the problems as soon as possible. It urged customers to allow extra time at airports.

More than 60 flights from Heathrow and Gatwick were canceled and more than 100 were delayed, according to the departure boards at the two airports.

CNBC’s David Reid reported:

In a tweet pinned to on BA’s Twitter account on Wednesday, the airline said it was working as “quickly as possible” to resolve the issue.

BA is advising customers to check the status of their flights before making the journey to their airport.

The airline, which is owned by International Airlines Group, said customers booked on short haul flights out of London were being asked to travel on a different day.

British Airways was unable to confirm to CNBC how many people or flights had been affected.

It’s the third major IT failure for the airline in two years after 672 flights were cancelled in May 2017 and another outage at Heathrow in July last year.

The Daily Mail’s Martin Robinson updated the number of delayed flights to more than 200:

British Airways was today branded an ‘utter shambles’ after 15,000 people in Britain and across the globe were left stranded after yet another IT meltdown forced them to cancel 100 flights and delay 200 more.

The airline’s system failure – the third in recent weeks – left customers unable to check-in or trapped inside grounded planes with some so furious they gave up and walked off.

Lines of people stuck at Gatwick and Heathrow today snaked around terminal buildings with James North, who is due to fly to Heraklion, Crete, today telling MailOnline: ‘It’s not the world favourite airline – it’s now the world biggest airline queue’. 

Matt Knopp wrote: ‘BA – wtf? Flight cancelled due to continuous system issues you seem totally inept to sort out for the past three years. Get a f**king grip!’ 

Customers were also stuck at London City, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and other BA hubs in Britain – but passengers across Europe as well as in Japan, India and the US were also hit. 

Irate passengers took to social media to vent their fury and revealed their dream family holidays and even their weddings could be ruined by the IT problems with some so upset they gave up and walked off grounded jets.