BA passengers endured a weekend of disruption following an IT outage at the airline on Friday evening.
BA’s website and app were inaccessible for hours on Friday evening, preventing customers from checking in online or booking flights. Saturday then saw the worst of the disruption, with all short-haul flights to and from Heathrow cancelled. There were also delays to flights operating out of Gatwick and London City Airports. Although the technical issues were resolved by Sunday, a significant number of Heathrow flights were cancelled again because of the knock-on effect of Saturday’s disruption to schedules. Whilst there are no reports of delays or cancellations today, it may yet take some time to reunite passengers with their luggage after the breakdown in the baggage system.
Social media commentary by disgruntled passengers has highlighted a lack of communication from BA, with no information on the website and phone calls not being answered. Dealing with delays and cancellations is a core part of running an airline, so these failures are rather surprising. Worse still, some passengers have complained that staff were unhelpful.
You will recall that this is not the first time that BA has been in the news because of IT problems. In particular, a data centre outage in 2017 cost them £58m. Sadly, it is not clear from their response over the weekend that the correct lessons have been learned from these previous incidents.