British Airways cancels flights from London as global IT outage causes chaos | Reuters
FILE PHOTO - British Airways logos are seen on tailfins at Heathrow Airport in west London, Britain May 12, 2011. REUTERS/Toby Melville/Files
LONDON British Airways canceled all its flights from London's two biggest airports on Saturday after a global computer system failure caused confusion and chaos, with thousands of passengers queuing for hours and planes left stuck on runways.
The airline, which said there was no evidence of a cyber attack, said the major outage meant it had been forced to cancel all scheduled flights from Heathrow and Gatwick and had also hit its call centers and website.
"Most long-haul flights due to land in London tomorrow are expected to arrive as normal, and we are working to restore our services from tomorrow, although some delays and disruption may continue into Sunday," said BA, part of Europe's largest airline group IAG (ICAG.L ).
"We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers during this busy holiday period."
The problems, which passengers said had affected flights across Britain, came on a particularly busy weekend with a public holiday on Monday and many children starting their school half-term breaks.
Terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick became jammed with angry passengers, with confused BA staff unable to help as they had no access to their computers.
"It's a complete nightmare. There's just hundreds and thousands of people accumulating in the departures bit," Roshni Burt, who was flying from Heathrow to Bahrain with her young son, told Reuters.
She arrived at the airport at 0730 GMT, queued for hours at the check-in, where the baggage drop-off system stopped working, and then waited at the departure gate for two hours until passengers were told the flight was canceled.
All the affected passengers were corralled through a single gate so they could go back through border checks and then re-book flights.
"MASSIVE SCRUM"
"We are now in a massive scrum trying to get to this gate. BA staff didn't know what's going on," Burt said. "Border control aren't going to be able to deal with all these people. I don't know what's going to happen."
BA is the latest airline to be hit by computer problems. Last month Germany's Lufthansa (LHAG.DE ) and Air France (AIRF.PA ) suffered a global system outage which prevented them from boarding passengers.
In September last year BA apologized to passengers for check-in delays caused by operational glitches that delayed flights at Gatwick and Heathrow, in a repeat of a similar incident that affected London-area flights for the airline last July.
In August a power surge near U.S. airline Delta's (DAL.N ) Atlanta headquarters caused computers to crash and led to widespread delays across Delta's entire network.
BA said it would try to get affected customers onto the next available flight and those unable to fly would get a full refund. Some passengers said they had boarded flights but were then left stuck on the runway.
"Still on the tarmac at Leeds. #britishairways reckon Heathrow is so backed up we can't set off. No way we'll make our Vegas flight," one passenger David Raine wrote on Twitter.
Another, journalist Martyn Kent, wrote: "Sat on plane at Heathrow for hour and a half now. @British_Airways Captain describes IT problem as 'catastrophic'."
Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, said in a statement: "We are working closely with the airline to assist passengers who have been affected by the British Airways issue and have extra customer service colleagues in terminals to assist those passengers already at Heathrow,"
In February IAG reported its annual operating profit rose 8.6 percent to 2.5 billion euros and said its British Airways transatlantic business, based at Heathrow, had held up well compared with Europe's highly competitive budget market.
(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Greg Mahlich, Guy Faulconbridge, Andrew Bolton)
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