British Airways flights in chaos as another IT failure strikes

Tens of thousands of British Airways passengers encountered long delays and possible missed connections after another major IT failure.

On Monday evening passengers at London Heathrow Terminal 5, as well as airports abroad, say they have been told communications systems have failed.

In one example, flight BA365 from Lyon to Heathrow remained on the ground in France for two hours 40 minutes, rather than the expected one hour.

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The three evening departures from Manchester to Heathrow all arrived at least two hours late, jeopardising connections to destinations such as Abu Dhabi, Cape Town and Rio.

The airline’s website, ba.com, and its app also failed for a time – with a message reading: “We are experiencing high demand on ba.com at the moment.”

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Problems began shortly after 5pm GMT. Some outbound British Airways flights from Heathrow were delayed by up to two hours, including departures to Geneva, Larnaca, Vienna, Vancouver and Dusseldorf.

Domestic flights to and from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle were running an hour or more late.

Arrivals from Continental airports are typically being delayed by an hour or more. The final flight from Europe, BA861 from Prague, touched down a few minutes before midnight. Normally arrivals are scheduled to end at 10.55pm.

Hector McNeil wrote on X: “British Airways cmon let’s have some updates pls on the pc outage. Stuck in Vienna!!!!”

His BA Airbus A319 landed on schedule at the Austrian capital from Heathrow shortly before 6pm, but left nearly two hours late.

Between 5.45pm and 8.45pm only one of dozens of scheduled British Airways departures from Heathrow was on time: a flight to Rome.

With limits on the hours in which planes can depart and arrive at Heathrow, any disruption can swiftly lead to cancellations.

In addition, the complex air-traffic control operation at Heathrow requires a steady flow of departures and arrivals in order to function properly.

Any “bunching” of flights can swiftly lead to widespread disruption.

Many passengers flying into Heathrow in order to transfer to departing overnight flights are likely to miss their connections. For example the early evening flights from Edinburgh and Glasgow, due in shortly before 7pm, were over two hours behind schedule. Arrivals from Belfast and Dublin are about 90 minutes late.

The inbound flight from Johannesburg, due to arrive at 4.45am, arrived over two hours behind schedule – with a consequent impact on connections on Tuesday morning.

But a spokesperson for the airline said: “Our teams worked hard to resolve an issue we experienced for a short time earlier this evening.

“We’ve apologised to customers for delays to their flights and ensured they were able to reach their destinations as planned.”

At least eight BA flights serving London Heathrow on Tuesday have been cancelled: to and from Geneva, Lyon, Milan Malpensa and Nice. But these are not believed to be related to the IT issues on Monday night.

British Airways has a long history of falling foul of IT failures. In May 2023 more than 200 BA flights were grounded, affecting over 30,000 passengers across a bank holiday weekend.

Even worse, over a bank holiday weekend in May 2017, during a routine systems upgrade, a switch was thrown that brought the entire BA Heathrow operation to a standstill. Hundreds of thousands of passengers had their travel plans torn up.