British Airways IT outage spawns travel chaos in London
British Airways canceled all flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports 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. Chief executive Alex Cruz said “we believe the root cause was a power-supply issue and we have no evidence of any cyberattack.”
He said the crash had affected “all of our check-in and operational systems.”
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 Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6 p.m. because the two airports had become severely congested. The airline later scrapped flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of the day.
The airline said it was working to restore services out of the airports beginning today, although some disruptions are expected. It said it expected that London-bound long-haul flights would land on schedule.
The problem comes on a bank holiday weekend, when tens of thousands of Britons and their families are travelling.
Passengers at Heathrow reported long lines at check-in counters and the failure of both the airline’s website and its mobile app. BA said the crash also affected its call centers.
“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.
Some BA flights were still arriving at Heathrow on Saturday, although with delays.
Air industry consultant John Strickland said Saturday’s problems would have “a massive knock-on effect” for several days.
“Manpower, dealing with the backlog of aircraft out of position, parking spaces for the aircraft —it’s a challenge and a choreographic nightmare,” he said.
A union official, meanwhile, blamed BA cost cutting for the travel chaos, saying the airline had laid off hundreds of IT staff last year and outsourced the work to India.
“This could have all been avoided,” said Mick Rix, national officer for aviation at the GMB union.