British Airways IT glitch cancels ALL flights from London's major airports

By Michael Holden

British Airways canceled all its flights from London's two biggest airports today after a global computer system failure caused confusion and chaos,

Thousands of passengers were forced to queue for hours and planes left stuck on runways.

The airline, which said there was no evidence of a cyber attack, said the major outage meant it had been forced to cancel all scheduled flights from Heathrow and Gatwick and had also hit its call centres and website.

"Most long-haul flights due to land in London tomorrow are expected to arrive as normal, and we are working to restore our services from tomorrow, although some delays and disruption may continue into Sunday," said BA, part of Europe's largest airline group IAG.

"We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers during this busy holiday period."

The problems, which passengers said had affected flights across Britain, came on a particularly busy weekend with a public holiday on Monday and many children starting their school half-term breaks.

Terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick became jammed with angry passengers, with confused BA staff unable to help as they had no access to their computers.

One woman told the Reuters news agency: "It's a complete nightmare. There's just hundreds and thousands of people accumulating in the departures bit.” who was flying from Heathrow to Bahrain with her young son, told Reuters.

She arrived at the airport at 7.30am local time, queued for hours at the check-in, where the baggage drop-off system stopped working, and then waited at the departure gate for two hours until passengers were told the flight was canceled.

All the affected passengers were corralled through a single gate so they could go back through border checks and then re-book flights.

Cyber attack?

BA is the latest airline to be hit by computer problems.

Last month Germany's Lufthansa and Air France suffered a global system outage which prevented them from boarding passengers.

In September last year BA apologised to passengers for check-in delays caused by operational glitches that delayed flights at Gatwick and Heathrow, in a repeat of a similar incident that affected London-area flights for the airline last July.

In August a power surge near US airline Delta's Atlanta headquarters caused computers to crash and led to widespread delays across Delta's entire network.

British Airways says no evidence global IT outage caused by cyber attack

BA said it would try to get affected customers onto the next available flight and those unable to fly would get a full refund.