British Airways flights: Warning of major flight delays after IT outage leaves passengers stranded across Europe - what has airline said?

The glitch happened last night (Monday 18 November) leaving passengers left standing in the cold waiting for updates on their flight. Travellers were left stranded at airports in the UK and abroad due to the “technical issue”.

The problems, which the airline said had since been resolved, started at around 5pm. Domestic flights to and from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle airports were delayed by an hour or more, while international services from Heathrow to destinations including Geneva, Vienna, Larnaca, Vancouver and Dusseldorf were pushed back by up to two hours.

One flight from Lyon to Heathrow remained on the ground in France for two hours and 40 minutes and three departures from Manchester to Heathrow arrived at least two hours behind schedule. The airline's website also went down for some time, with a message on the homepage reading: "We are experiencing high demand on ba.com at the moment."

The IT issue meant pilots have been unable to file flight plans electronically and had had to manually call into the operations centre at Heathrow. The airline said on Monday night that the IT issue had been resolved, but passengers were still experiencing severe disruption as a knock-on effect of the earlier technical hitch. 

A spokesperson for British Airways said: “Our teams worked hard to resolve an issue we experienced for a short time earlier this evening. We've apologised to customers for delays to their flights and ensured they were able to reach their destinations as planned.”