British Airways said a computer outage brought down its airport check-in system, causing delays to services across its global network and prompting staff to issue passengers with handwritten boarding passes in order to keep flights operating.
“We’ve experienced some problems today, which our IT teams are working to resolve as quickly as possible,” the airline said Tuesday via Twitter, without specifying what had caused the systems failure. Travelers should still make their way to the airport for their scheduled departure times, it advised.
British Airways is continuing to check people in at its London Heathrow hub, as well as at Gatwick, south of the city, though the process is taking longer than usual, spokeswoman Liza Ravenscroft said by e-mail. Passengers tweets said that boarding passes are being issued by hand at some locations.
Customers should also be able to check-in online and print their own boarding passes, according the airline, which is a unit of London-based International Consolidated Airlines Group SA.
The BA outage comes after Delta Air Lines last month suffered 2,300 flight cancellations, costing about $100 million in lost revenue, after a power-control module caught fire. A computer failure at Southwest Airlines Co. in July also cost “tens of millions” of dollars and affected a similar number of services.
London City airport, which serves the UK capital's business district, was meanwhile closed Tuesday morning after protesters occupied the runway. Local press reports said the people were members of the Black Lives Matter campaign group.
News by Bloomberg, edited by Hospitality Ireland
