British Airways travelers still facing cancellations

LONDON — Travelers on British Airways faced a third day of delays and cancellations yesterday, though most long-haul services were resumed, after a colossal IT failure over the weekend caused chaos for thousands of passengers.

BA chief executive Alex Cruz said the airline was running a “near-full operation” at London’s Gatwick Airport and planned to operate all scheduled long-haul services from Heathrow. But he said there would still be delays, as well as some canceled short-haul flights.

Data from flight tracker FlightAware.com showed BA canceled another 27 flights and had 135 more delayed yesterday, a bank holiday in the U.K. that sees a high level of air travel.

Iberia and Air Nostrum, which like BA are part of the broader International Airlines Group and share some data, canceled over 320 flights yesterday.

BA canceled all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick on Saturday after the IT outage, which it blamed on a power-supply problem. The glitch threw the plans of tens of thousands of travelers into disarray — by Sunday night, almost 600 BA flights had been grounded.

Cruz told Sky News yesterday the problem started at 9:30 Saturday morning when “there was indeed a power surge that had a catastrophic effect over some communications hardware which eventually affected all the messaging across our systems.”

He said there was no evidence indicating the airline had come under cyberattack.

BA operates hundreds of flights from Heathrow and Gatwick on a typical day — and both are major hubs for worldwide travel.