«Chaos» at Heathrow as British Airways Systems Crash «Again»

Local Editor

British Airways [BA] systems had crashed causing "total chaos" for holidaymakers yet again.

The technical fault sparked huge delays and queue at London's two biggest airports - Heathrow and Gatwick. Issues were also reported at London City.

Pictures emerged of queues up to eight rows deep at the check-in desk of Gatwick Airport.

Flights from the capital to destinations including, Athens, Milan, Malta, Malaga, Glasgow and Dubrovnik were all delayed by the fault.

Some passengers were even stuck on planes on the runway as they waited for the issue to be resolved. While others were unable to check in online for their flights and were told they had been "departed".

The glitch lasted around 20 minutes and Heathrow has said operations are running as normal.

The airline said it was having to use a manual check-in process which takes longer than the computerized system.

One passenger described the bag drop area at Heathrow Terminal 5 as "almost at a standstill".

Holidaymaker Amanda Jane Porter tweeted: "T5 is absolute carnage with systems down!!'Very unhappy customers left right and center. #stillqueuing."

Another passenger wrote: "Total chaos at Heathrow."

A spokeswoman for the airline wrote on Twitter: "We're experiencing some issues with our check-in system this morning. We're sorry for any inconvenience this is causing."

A BA spokesman later said: "Customers are being checked in as normal after an earlier problem was resolved."

"We are sorry for the temporary check in problems which caused some delays for our customers first thing this morning," the BA spokesman added.

He went on to say: "This issue is now resolved and our staff are working flat out to help customers get away on their holidays."

A spokesman for Heathrow Airport said: "Due to issues experienced earlier with the British Airways check-in system, some passengers experienced minor delays in Terminal 5."

"We apologize for this experience and can confirm the issue has now been resolved," the spokesman added.

The disruption comes around two months after more than 670 flights were cancelled due to a power failure over the spring bank holiday weekend.

In May this year and IT engineer allegedly failed to follow proper procedure at a Heathrow data center and caused "catastrophic physical damage" to servers leaving 75,000 stranded across the globe.

The outage lasted just 15 minutes but it stopped online check-in, grounded planes and broke baggage systems and meant BA was unable to resume a full schedule for four days.

Some passengers were still waiting to be reunited with their luggage almost a week on.

british airway | heathrow | uk

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team