Airport chaos returns as 51 f lights cancelled
CHAOS returned to Dublin Airport yesterday as Aer Lingus was forced to cancel all its shorthaul flights due to an ‘IT outage’.
Yesterday morning the airline said some of its flights departing Dublin might be delayed after its online reservation and operation system went down.
It later urged passengers not to come to the airport as it cancelled the remainder of its short-haul flights for the rest of the day.
Aer Lingus said in a statement: ‘Due to a major incident with a network provider, our cloudbased systems enabling check-in, boarding and our website are currently unavailable. A UK network provider servicing the cloud-based system has experienced a major break in connectivity.
‘At this time the provider has not been able to give Aer Lingus an estimate of the time when the break in connectivity will be restored. Unfortunately, this is causing severe disruption to Aer Lingus services today. Consequently, all flights originally scheduled to depart from Dublin Airport for European and United Kingdom destinations from 2pm onwards today have had to be cancelled.’
The statement added: ‘We sincerely apologise to all customers impacted by today’s disruption and cancellations.’
One passenger caught up in yesterday’s queues told the Irish Mail on Sunday, ‘It’s absolutely insane. We’ve been in the line for about an hour now. My parents’ flight is due to leave at 1.05pm and you know how US customs can be. It’s crazy. The line pretty much wraps around Terminal 2.
You go inside and you have to queue again to get to Aer Lingus.
‘I was speaking to one woman and her flight was due to leave at 12.40pm and there were about 23 flights ahead of hers. I don’t think she’ll be making her flight.
‘It’s going to be a bit rough. There are two in front of us who were at Garth Brooks and they’re trying to fly home to England. There are no seats for anyone. My father uses a wheelchair and they can’t give him one because they’re so overbooked.’
Aer Lingus last night confirmed that the outage which resulted in 51 flights being cancelled had been resolved and that today’s flights would operate as normal.
In a statement, the airline said: ‘As systems have now been restored, we are contacting customers directly in order to re-accommodate them as efficiently as possible.’