………scores of passengers stranded, hotels hike prices
British Airways chaos: All flights cancelled at Heathrow and Gatwick after global computer failure
British Airways has cancelled all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick following a massive global IT failure.
Every departure scheduled on Saturday was cancelled and the airline asked passengers not to come to the airports.
On Saturday night the operator said it intended to run a “near normal schedule” at Gatwick on Sunday and the “majority of services” from Heathrow.
It comes as hotels surrounding the airports charged extortionate prices to stranded holiday makers with some charging between £1,000 to £2,5000 a room for the night.
The chaos happened just after 11am on Saturday when the company’s unreliable new IT system crashed worldwide for the sixth time in a year.
After thousands of furious complaints from customers left in the dark about their flights, bags and compensation, the company released a video online of CEO Alex Cruz apologising to passengers.
In it he said the global IT failure was down to a problem with power supply and that technical teams were working “tirelessly” to get systems back up and running.
Travellers at British airports started flooding the company’s Twitter account with complaints of flights grounded, online services unavailable and huge queues.
The computer glitch, which also took out the BA website for two hours, comes after an outage in September of last year which followed four in the space of a month across June and July.
This afternoon, BA said it had cancelled all flights leaving from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of today because of a “major IT system failure”.
A spokeswoman had previously apologised to customers adding: “We are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.”
