Some travellers reported delays of four hours or more, either on the tarmac at various airports, or in packed customer lounges. By 8 p.m. EDT, there were already long queues and thousands of frustrated passengers at airports around the world.
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The airline said some flights had been cancelled due to the unspecified technical problems and passengers are being told to check-in online before they travel.
“We apologise to our customers for the delay and we appreciate their patience as our IT teams work to resolve this issue”, they wrote.
“We are sorry for the delay to their journeys”, it said.
Elsewhere there were reports of fed-up fliers as airline staff resorted to writing out boarding passes.
A DAA spokeswoman said three departing flights scheduled to London City were delayed by two hours, while another was cancelled with passengers transferred to another flight.
Passengers were said to be boarding flights with boarding card written out by hand.
British Airways has yet to reveal what prompted such an outage with its check-in system, but the glitch had a far reaching affect causing delays as far as San Francisco.
Late Monday, delays occurred at airports including Atlanta, Chicago and Boston, as well as the Bahamas and Mexico.
“This has affected a number of our airports”.
The airline has apologised and says passengers are now being checked in at Heathrow and Gatwick Airports but that the process may be “a bit slower than usual”.
The glitch affecting BA follows the crippling power outage suffered by Delta Air Lines last month, although it doesn’t appear as severe.
Another passenger, 29-year-old Matthew Walker from London, had waited more than two hours to board his flight back to Heathrow, reporting that ground staff were unable to access their computer systems to see which passengers had passed through security.
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The protesters were holding up posters saying “Climate Crisis is a Racist Crisis” and ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They wanted to underline Britain’s environmental influence on the lives of black individuals globally and locally.
