British Airways IT Failure
British Airways latest statement - Tuesday 30th May
Our IT systems are back up and running and our operation continues to run as planned today with a full flight schedule at Heathrow and Gatwick.
We are extremely sorry for the frustration and inconvenience customers experienced over the Bank Holiday weekend and thank them for their patience and understanding.
We are continuing to work to get delayed bags to customers as quickly as possible. Information on how to report and track delayed bags can be found on ba.com.
Latest statement from Alex Cruz, British Airways chief executive – Monday May 29, 3pm
Since this issue began on Saturday morning, our whole priority has been on putting things right for our customers – and we are making good progress.
We apologise profusely to our customers for the awful experiences they've been having. We know customers have been having a horrible time. Some have had holidays curtailed or missed special occasions, or had to spend many hours at airports waiting for news.
Today is the second full day since we lost all our systems – and we plan to fly more than 95 per cent of our normal flight schedule.
We are back to normal at Gatwick. At Heathrow, we will fly a full long-haul programme and more than 90 per cent of short-haul.
About 75,000 customers lost their flights on Saturday and yesterday. Despite this being a peak holiday period, more than two thirds of these customers will have flown to their destinations by the end of today.
Some customers are choosing to change their travel dates and they will be able to choose any alternative dates within the next six months.
We have been giving letters to customers telling them how to claim under EU compensation rules and we will fully honour our obligations.
Once the disruption is over, we will carry out an exhaustive investigation into what caused this incident, and take measures to ensure it never happens again.
At this stage we know there was an exceptional power surge that collapsed our IT systems, bringing down all our flight, baggage and customer communication systems.
It appears to have been so strong that it rendered the back-up system ineffective. This resulted in an outage of all our systems across our 170 airports in 70 different countries. These systems are highly inter-dependent and normally transmit tens of millions of messages a day between different parts of the airline.
At the moment, we do not have a complete picture of what happened. Our focus has been on putting things right for the customers affected. When that process is complete, we will hold an exhaustive investigation into the causes of this incident – and do whatever is necessary to ensure it cannot recur.
We continue to make good progress in rebuilding our operation, following Saturday's major IT systems failure which severely affected our operations worldwide.
We operated a full schedule at Gatwick on Sunday. At Heathrow, we operated virtually all our scheduled long-haul flights, though the knock-on effects of Saturday's disruption resulted in a reduced short-haul programme.
As our IT systems move closer to full operational capacity, we will again run a full schedule at Gatwick on Monday and intend to operate a full long-haul schedule and a high proportion of our short-haul programme at Heathrow.
We apologise again to customers for the frustration and inconvenience they are experiencing and thank them for their continued patience.
We continue to urge customers due to fly from Heathrow on Monday to check on ba.com that they have a confirmed booking and that their flight is operating before setting off for the airport. Customers looking to re-book flights should go to BA.com.
Following the major IT system failure experienced earlier today, with regret we have had to cancel all flights leaving from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of today, Saturday, May 27.
We are working hard to get our customers who were due to fly today onto the next available flights over the course of the rest of the weekend. Those unable to fly will be offered a full refund.
The system outage has also affected our call centres and our website but we will update customers as soon as we are able to.
Most long-haul flights due to land in London tomorrow (Sunday, May 28) 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.
We will continue to provide information on ba.com, Twitter and through airport communication channels.
We will be updating the situation via the media regularly throughout the day.
We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers during this busy holiday period.