28 May, 2017
At least three UAE-bound flights have been affected after British Airways announced it cancelled all flights from London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports Saturday due to a massive computer glitch.
The disruption coincides with the start of the annual end-of-May bank holiday weekend in the United Kingdom, as well as the three-day Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. Last September, a computer network failure brought down British Airways' check-in system, causing worldwide service delays, while earlier this week, London Gatwick airport reported problems with its baggage-sorting system.
BA says there was no evidence of a cyberattack.
A catastrophic computer outage crippled one of the world's busiest flights hubs on Saturday, forcing British Airways to cancel all flights out of two London airports, leaving terminals in chaos and countless passengers stranded.
Several hours after problems began cropping up Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6 p.m. because the two airports had become severely congested.
"Currently the only information that we have is that the systems are out because of the system outage", the spokesperson told RT. "We are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible", a British Airways spokeswoman told CNN via email.
The problems mean parts of BA's website are unavailable and some travellers claimed they could not check in on the mobile app.
Passengers were hit by severe delays in September and July previous year because of IT glitches.
In this image taken from the twitter feed of Emily Puddifer a view of Terminal 5 departure lounge at London's Heathrow airport after
BA passengers were hit with severe delays in July and September 2016 because of problems with the airline's online check-in systems.
The outage comes amid a busy weekend for travel, with Monday being a holiday in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Angry passengers were forced to return home or to hotels, as the airports were emptied of people booked on British Airways flights, including those to the Middle East.
BA aircraft landing at Heathrow are unable to park up as outbound aircraft can not vacate the gates, which has resulted in passengers being stuck on aircraft.
BA said it was trying to restore operations on Sunday, although some disruption to services would continue. "For hour now.no offer of drinks. and because ba only takes cards now, we only have cash...wat we supposed to do!??", Julie Adie wrote on Twitter.
Ebenezer saw lots of slow-moving lines, with some people asked to wait outside Terminal 5, he said.
"We will be updating the situation via the media regularly throughout the day". "Have been stuck in a plane for 1 hour, and now at the airport for 2".
