British Airways on Tuesday apologised to its passengers who faced delays after an IT glitch affected check-in desks. Those messages and complaints are coming from people at airports including Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Bahamas, and Mexico.
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“Our IT teams are working as hard as they can to quickly fix a problem with our check-in system”, a spokeswoman told the broadcaster, going on to apologise for the delays and disruption.
BA has been phasing in the new system since late 2015 and a glitch in July caused major delays in passengers checking in to London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
A professional poker player from London indicated that she was queued for her flight in Las Vegas for more than two and a half hours.
Computer glitches are continuing to cause problems for airlines. They are investigating how the protesters gained access to the airport.
Twitter user John Bevir wrote: “Huge computer issue affecting British Airways across USA”.
British Airways, the U.K.’s flag carrier, is owned by International Airlines Group, whose other businesses include Ireland’s Aer Lingus and Spain’s Iberia. The airline said that check-in may still “take longer than usual”, but it is advising passengers to arrive on time for their flights, and suggests that they check themselves in online if possible. Passengers were given handwritten boarding passes while the check-in system was down.
“The campaign group Black Lives Matter said its activists were behind the protest”.
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The BA outage comes after Delta Air Lines last month suffered 2,300 flight cancellations, costing about US$100 million in lost revenue, after a power-control module caught fire. Three weeks before that, Southwest Airlines had to cancel thousands of flights after a notebook-sized router failed at a data center in Dallas and it took 13 hours to reboot its systems.
