British Airways has so far failed to explain what caused its latest IT failure, which disrupted flights across its network on Monday evening.
The airline’s website and app crashed at around 5pm on Monday, meaning passengers were unable to book or check in for flights.
Pilots also allegedly told passengers they were being kept on the tarmac because BA’s internal communications systems had gone down at the same time.
Flightradar24.com showed that many flights from UK airports alone were delayed yesterday evening during the IT glitch. Most seem to have been held up by around an hour, but some took off more than two hours late.
BA issued a statement on Monday evening saying ‘a technical issue’ was affecting some of its systems. The issue appears to have been resolved within a couple of hours, however, but the airline has not said what caused the problem.
The latest IT failure follows a technical meltdown over the May Bank Holiday last year when more than 200 British Airways flights were cancelled.
Since we published this story, BA has issued the following statement: “A technical issue affecting some of our operational systems meant that for a short period on Monday, we were unable to depart flights as quickly as usual. Our back-up network immediately kicked in so our operation could continue and we were able to get our main systems back online within an hour.
“There were no cancellations on our mainline network as a result of this issue. We’ve made significant investment in our IT infrastructure, putting in £750m to replace legacy systems to help prevent outages and recover more quickly when they do occur, which is exactly what happened here.
“We never want to inconvenience customers. We’ve apologised to those who did face delays and we’re grateful to them for their patience, as well as our colleagues who worked so hard to resolve this issue and support customers.”
