British Airways check-in tech failure causes chaos at airports

In the latest of a series of tech failures for British Airways (BA), the company has apologised for yesterday's failure of its check-in services, which caused long queues and delays for passengers.

Because of the issue, customers at Heathrow, Gatwick and London City airports were forced to check in manually - a much slower process.

"We are sorry for the temporary check-in problems which causes some delays for our customers first thing this morning," a spokesman told Reuters. "This issue is now resolved and our staff are working flat out to help customers get away on their holidays."

This is not the first time this year that BA has experienced problems, with a massive IT outage in May ultimately blamed on human error. The incident saw hundreds of flights cancelled because an engineer had switched off the power supply to one of the company data centres by mistake.

In April another outage resulted in passengers experiencing long delays on the online check-in service, with customers unable to book, check-in online or access their accounts for around seven hours. Customers were asked instead to check-in at the airport on the day of their flight.

At the time, Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of Catchpoint, said: "The most important takeaway from this incident is that we all have a duty to our customers to provide the best service possible, under any circumstance.

"Issues like this one are not unusual, but it's important that digital businesses take necessary steps to reset their preventative strategies to see and resolve performance issues."

A similar problem hit Manchester airport last month, when a technical failure left passengers stranded for several hours after the check-in system was found unable to register passengers - leading 12 Thomas Cook flights to be grounded while staff switched to a manual system.