British Airways IT outage leaves travellers stranded

British Airways has blamed a supplier-side system issue for the cancellation of dozens of flights yesterday, with knock-on disruption continuing this morning.

The unidentified IT failures left passengers stranded as flights were cancelled to and from Heathrow Airport yesterday evening, and hundreds of people were reportedly told to return on Thursday in order to fly.

Problems were compounded by the temporary closure of Heathrow's air traffic control tower, reportedly due to a fire alarm, causing long queues at Terminal 5 and the diversion of flights to other airports.

"It's complete chaos," one traveller told Sky News, while another explained: "We're really not getting any information at the moment. Nobody's being sorted out... They can't re-book the flights because they've got no computer system. Everyone's just sitting here."

A BA spokeswoman said: "We are doing everything we can to help customers whose travel plans were disrupted yesterday from a supplier system issue affecting a number of airlines, and the temporary closure of Heathrow Airport's air traffic control tower."

She added that flights are operating today, now the supplier "has resolved the issue", but didn't explain what the root cause was when IT Pro asked.

It's not the first time BA passengers have suffered because of the airline's IT problems. Check in issues last August caused delays at Gatwick, Heathrow and London City airports, while a massive IT outage occurred in May 2017 after an engineer mistakenly cut the power to one of BA's data centres.

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