IT issue causes delays, queues and missed flights at Stansted

Multiple airport systems affected

Passenger queues stretched from the main entrance of Stansted Airport and past the terminal building over the weekend, due to IT disruption.

The airport says the incident was caused by an “IT issue” - since fixed – and not a cyberattack.

However, systems including check-in, baggage and security were all affected.

Stansted told us that the flaw was down to an internet connectivity issue in the affected systems, but the root cause was still unknown. An investigation is ongoing.

Although the issue has been fixed, delays continued through the weekend, with multiple passengers missing flights.

One woman told the BBC, "I spoke to one woman who had already been standing for an hour and we were getting nowhere near the entrance," she said.

"The queue for security was out the door and around the corner.”

She eventually left Stansted after queuing for more than two hours, when her flight left without the passengers who hadn’t yet made it through – a problem for many planes through the day.

Anne Alexander, a journalist for ITV, said the shuffling crowd was “like the Walking Dead.”

“We had little to no information. They can’t help an IT outage, but the response appeared disorganised.”

Stansted offered passengers the ability to rebook flights for free, but Alexander estimated that queue was also about two hours long.

The airport first acknowledged the issue at 6am on Sunday morning and said it had been fixed by 8am.

However, at 10:30 it was back on social media to confirm that the glitch was now “fully resolved.”

Stansted is the third largest of London’s airports, and the second to suffer a mass IT issue this year. Heathrow, the country’s largest airport, had a power outage two months ago after a fire in an electrical substation closed the site for 24 hours.