BRITISH Airways yesterday cancelled some of its flights around the world due to global IT failure.
The Lagos – London and Abuja – London flights as well as those from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports were affected leading to severe disruption for travellers.
The airline said it suffered a “major IT systems failure” and apologized to its passengers.
However, the cancellation was announced after the BA plane plying the Abuja route had departed.
BA said terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick became extremely congested and it was cancelling all flights from the airports. It urged passengers not to go to the airports.
Earlier, passengers at Heathrow reported long lines at check-in counters and flight delays.
Passengers at Heathrow Airport reported long lines at check-in counters and flight delays. One posted a picture on Twitter of BA staff writing gate numbers on a white board.
“We’ve tried all of the self-check-in machines. None were working, apart from one,” said Terry Page, booked on a flight to Texas. “There was a huge queue for it and it later transpired that it didn’t actually work, but you didn’t discover that until you got to the front.”
The problem came on a holiday weekend, when thousands of Britons were travelling.
British Airways Country Manager, Kola Olayinka confirmed the development.
The airline was busy all day yesterday in Nigeria trying to reach its customers already booked to inform them of the development.
Travellers at British airports flooded the company’s Twitter account with complaints of flights grounded, unavailable online services and huge queues.
The computer glitch, which also took out the BA website for two hours, came after a similar outage last September.
Delays were reported in Rome, Prague, Milan, Stockholm and Malaga.
