British Airways suffers delays after IT outage at London Heathrow Airport hub
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Passengers queue for the assistance with self check-in machines at Heathrow Terminal 3 on Aug 22.
PHOTO: REUTERS
LONDON – British Airways passengers on Nov 18 suffered delays following a systems outage at the airline’s main operations centre in Heathrow that prevented communication with aircraft across the region.
The carrier said that “our flights are currently operating, but are experiencing delays as our teams work to resolve a technical issue affecting some of our systems”, according to a statement.
A spokesperson for the airline, which is owned by IAG, later on Nov 18 said the technical issue had been resolved.
“We’ve apologised to customers for delays to their flights and ensured they were able to reach their destinations as planned,” the spokesperson said via e-mail.
The company did not immediately respond to further questions on the number of flights delayed or the extent of the disruption.
Heathrow, the main hub in the UK and British Airways’ biggest base, said separately that it’s “aware of a technical issue that British Airways are investigating, and we will be working with them to provide updates to passengers as soon as they are available. Heathrow’s systems are operating as normal”.
There was no immediate data available immediately on the number of delayed flights. British Airways said earlier in a note on social media platform X that its website was also down and that the company was doing “all we can to return online as soon as possible”.
The glitch occurred a good year after Britain suffered its worst air-traffic outage in a decade. That fault was caused by an anomaly in the airspace manager’s software system that triggered a shutdown. As a result, about 800 flights leaving British airports were cancelled on the day, with a similar number of arrivals scrapped. Bloomberg
