British Airways says it has resolved IT issue that caused more than 150 flights to be cancelled

The outage was not caused due to a cyber attack, BA said

British Airways (BA) was hit by a major IT issue on late Friday, forcing the carrier to cancel all short-haul flights from Heathrow Airport until Saturday midday GMT.

The issue was not due to a cyber attack, according to the airline, but it did not provide further details.

In an update on Sunday, BA stated that while the systems issues had been resolved, the passengers whose flight had been cancelled or who were waiting baggage should avoid going to the Heathrow Airport, as T5 was very busy.

Late Friday, BA passengers reported having problems at Heathrow Airport after the airline suffered a major outage, causing delays and cancellations of flights, luggage pile-ups and people becoming stranded on planes after landing at Heathrow.

BA stated that it was experiencing major technical issues that were affecting the operation and resulting in the cancellation of a number of flights.

The carrier's website and app were down for several hours on Friday evening, preventing customers from booking tickets or accessing flight information.

Heathrow Airport said that its systems were operating as normal and that it would work with BA to provide updates as soon as they become available.

As delays continued into Saturday, hundreds of travellers queued at airports, with some saying that they were running late for vacations after waiting for months to go abroad due to pandemic cancellations.

According to Bloomberg, BA cancelled more than 150 short-haul flights to and from its London Heathrow hub through to Saturday midday. Saturday's cancellations included flights to Geneva, Aberdeen and Milan.

Many passengers criticised the airline on social media, saying they were not notified of cancellations and were unable to reach BA's call centres.

The airline apologised to customers for any inconvenience caused to them as a result of the outage. BA said that customers on cancelled flights would be given the option of receiving a full refund and that it would be contacting customers 'proactively'.

It was BA's second outage in the last 10 days. The BA cancelled several flights in and out of London airports after a storm hit the UK on February 18.

BA has suffered numerous high-profile IT incidents in recent years.

In 2020, The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined BA £20 million for a 2018 hack that saw credit card and personal data of more than 420,000 people stolen.

The stolen data included login details, PINs, payment card details, CVV numbers and passwords, and travel booking information as well names and addresses.

The airline first said 380,000 customers and BA staff had had data stolen, but later revised this figure upwards as more information emerged. The final figure was 429,612, the ICO said.