The company’s website and app were both down on Friday night (Picture: PA)
British Airways has suffered a major outage, causing several flights to be cancelled and leaving passengers stuck on planes after landing at Heathrow airport.
The company’s website and app were both down on Friday night, leaving customers unable to check in online or book flights.
The carrier confirmed that the outage was not due to a cyber attack and said passengers whose flights were cancelled will be offered a refund or rebook options.
It is the second time in a week it is suffering a systemwide outage.
The problems led to many flights from London’s Heathrow being grounded.
Passengers complained that they were stuck in terminals waiting for flights with no idea what was going on.
One person tweeted: (‘BA) seems to be suffering a catastrophic systems failure atm. Website down. App down. Airport screens down. Sitting at the gate at T5 waiting to board but nobody seems to know what is happening.’
Another person said: ‘Waiting for departure at T5 with no information, silent flight deck.’
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Ed Hall, 54, a television executive from Woodstock, Oxfordshire, was stranded on a plane for over an hour after touching down at Heathrow Terminal 5 because the crew could not access any IT systems to get a stand where passengers could disembark.
He said there were issues even before his BA 399 flight took off from Brussels.
Mr Hall said: ‘We couldn’t take off as the pilot’s system that calculates weight, loads and distribution went offline and we had to go back to the gate from the runway to get a (manual) copy sent from London.
‘BA is running on paper tonight.’
Heathrow said its systems were operating as normal and that the issue was a technical one that BA were investigating.
A spokesperson for the airport said: ‘Heathrow’s systems are operating as normal.
‘We are 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.’
A BA spokesperson said: ‘We are experiencing significant technical issues this evening which are affecting the running of our operation and regrettably has led to the cancellation of a number of flights.
‘We are working as quickly as possible to resolve things and we have back-up plans in place so that customers flying can still check-in at the airport this evening. We apologise that this might be slower than usual, but we are doing everything we can to get as many of our flights away as planned.
‘We are sorry to our customers, it’s been a very difficult week and we can only apologise for any further disruption they may experience this evening. We are doing all we can to ensure that we provide up to date information about what is going on. We will make decisions about our operation tomorrow as soon as we can and notify affected customers of any changes.’
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https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/25/british-airways-suffers-major-outage-with-flights-from-heathrow-grounded-16177243/
