British Airways cancellations spoil UK holiday weekend

The airline said it was suffering a “major IT systems failure” around the world, but there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

Travellers at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 after massive IT systems failure caused British Airways to cancel all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Saturday, May 27, 2017, the start of a holShow more

LONDON // British Airways cancelled all flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Saturday as a global IT failure upended the travel plans of tens of thousands of people on a busy U.K. holiday weekend.

The airline said it was suffering a “major IT systems failure” around the world. It did not specify the cause of the problem but said there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

BA operates hundreds of flights from the two London airports on a typical day — and both are major hubs for worldwide travel.

Several hours after problems began cropping up on Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6pm (1700GMT) because the two airports had become severely congested. The airline later scrapped flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of the day.

There were long queues at Heathrow check-in counters and the airline’s website and its mobile app also failed. BA said the crash also affected call centres.

The airline said it was working to restore services out of Heathrow and Gatwick from Sunday, although there will still be some disruptions. It said it expected that London-bound long-haul flights would land on schedule on Sunday.

One person posted a picture on Twitter of BA staff writing gate numbers on a white board.

“We’ve tried all of the self-check-in machines. None were working, apart from one,” said Terry Page, booked on a flight to Texas. “There was a huge queue for it and it later transpired that it didn’t actually work, but you didn’t discover that until you got to the front.”

Another traveller, PR executive Melissa Davis, said her BA plane was held for more than an hour and a half on the tarmac at Heathrow on a flight arriving from Belfast.

She said passengers had been told they could not transfer to other flights because “they can’t bring up our details.”

Passenger Phillip Norton tweeted video of an announcement from a pilot to passengers at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, saying the problem affects the system that regulates which passengers and baggage go on which aircraft. The pilot said passengers on planes that have landed at Heathrow were unable to get off because there was nowhere to park.

Some BA flights were still arriving at Heathrow on Saturday, although with delays.

The problem comes on a bank holiday weekend, when tens of thousands of Britons and their families are travelling.

American Airlines, which operates code-share flights with BA, said it was unaffected. “All of our flights are on time,” said spokesman Ross Feinstein.

BA passengers were hit with severe delays in July and September 2016 because of problems with the airline’s online check-in systems.

A union official accused BA of cutting costs by laying off IT staff last year and outsourcing the work to India.

“This could have all been avoided,” said Mick Rix, national officer for aviation at the GMB union. “We can only feel genuinely sorry for the tens of thousands of passengers who are stranded at airports and face having their travel plans and holidays ruined.”

* Associated Press