BA passengers hit by second day of global fallout from IT failure
Airline struggles to tackle cancellations and delays on peak travel weekend
British Airways passengers around the world were struck by a second day of cancellations and delays on Sunday as the airline struggled to regain control after a computer system failure caused chaos during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the UK.
Nearly a third of BA flights departing from Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, had been cancelled by Sunday afternoon, while inbound fights from destinations such as New York and Austin, Texas, were also scrapped, leaving passengers stranded.
Aviation experts predicted the disruption would spill over into the week as BA fought to recover from the major IT crash, which forced it to cancel all flights out of London on Saturday.
It was one of the worst IT failures to strike a global airline. Last year when Delta Air Lines suffered a similar outage. 2,300 flights were cancelled and delays took three days to clear.
“Coming after a spate of other issues, the bad PR and potential reputational aftermath will probably hit future revenues” at BA, which is part of the IAG airlines group, said Damian Brewer, analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
BA had been hoping to resume a “near normal” service out of Gatwick airport on Sunday and operate a “majority” of scheduled flights from Heathrow but passengers at the latter reported lengthy queues and over-crowding. Passengers at Heathrow were forced to wait outside terminal buildings until 90 minutes before their flight was due to depart, as airport and airline staff desperately sought to deal with the congestion.
“There are huge queues everywhere,” said Simon, a passenger waiting for his BA flight to Japan for a holiday. “People are queueing to deal with cancelled flights, there’s another queue for lost bags, and then there’s long queues to get into the departures terminal.”
Alex Cruz, chief executive of BA, blamed the IT meltdown on a “power supply issue” but the carrier would not provide further details on why all of its systems, including back-up systems, had failed. It said simply on Sunday that it was “continuing to work hard to restore all of our IT systems”.
Bill Curtis, senior vice-president at IT analytics firm CAST, questioned why a back-up system had not kicked in. “It [the back-up system] should have been on a different power supply with a replicated database. You would usually lose a few transactions but not the entire operation of the airline,” Mr Curtis told the Financial Times.
The IT meltdown is likely to provoke a further row over cost-cutting at BA, which has come under pressure from unions over its decision last year to outsource several hundred IT jobs to specialists supplied by India’s Tata Consultancy Services.
It has also been criticised in the past year for money-saving measures such as replacing free food and drink on short-haul flights with M&S sandwiches for which customers are required to pay.
Mr Cruz, who was chief executive of budget Spanish carrier Vueling before taking the top job at BA in April last year, has been trying to overhaul the UK airline's cost structure so it can better compete with low-cost companies such as Ryanair and easyJet, as well as the Gulf airlines.
Mick Rix, national aviation officer at GMB, the union, claimed the IT problems “could have all been avoided”.
“BA in 2016 made hundreds of dedicated and loyal IT staff redundant and outsourced the work to India,” he said.
BA denied the claim, responding: “We would never compromise the integrity and security of our IT systems. IT services are now provided globally by a range of suppliers and this is very common practice across all industries.”
BA’s management is also likely to face questions over staffing and communication, particularly on Saturday when passengers complained of a lack of information from airline staff.
Pat Oldham, a supply chain manager who was intending to travel to Seoul on Saturday but found himself stuck at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, complained he had “no contact with anyone from BA”.