BA computer glitch :Lagos passengers affected

Lagos flight, BA ‘worldwide’ passengers Flights to Lagos and Abuja from London were on Monday cancelled as passengers were left without flights for hours all over the globe owing to a major computer glitch that wreak havoc for British Airways.

It comes as thousands of Britons headed overseas for the long weekend with half-term school holidays next week.

Tens of thousands of British Airways passengers experienced long lines and hours-long delays at airports around the world overnight after a computer failure affected check-in systems.

Airline employees had to manually process passengers at airports including San Francisco, Seattle and Phoenix, delaying the departures of dozens of London-bound transatlantic flights.

The implication was that passengers already booked on the BA flight yesterday could no longer do as officials of the airline in Lagos were frantically working to reach virtually all the intending travellers on the problem which grounded the airline’s operations.

The BA Abuja flight was not affected early today because the problem started after the aircraft had departed.

Country Commercial Manager for BA (Nigeria and West Africa), Mr. Kola Olayinka said in Lagos that flight expected to depart at 11.40pm had been cancelled as plane could not leave London because of the problem.

Olayinka disclosed that the Abuja flight departed shortly before the glitch.

Except the problem is urgently resolved, Abuja flight from London could also be affected.

His words: “Tonight’s flight has been cancelled. The Abuja flight left before the glitch. They are trying to resolve the problem. The flight left before the glitch. It will be resolved. Our flight tonight to Lagos has been cancelled and we are hoping to restore the problems as soon as possible.

“We are working closely with the airline to resolve this and are advising passengers to check the status of their flight before travelling to the airport.

Meanwhile, the airline has cancelled all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick following a massive global IT failure.

Every departure scheduled yesterday has been cancelled and the airline is asking passengers not to come to the airports.

The company’s unreliable new IT system crashed worldwide for the sixth time in a year shortly after 11am Saturday

Travellers at British airports started flooding the company’s Twitter account with complaints of flights grounded, online services unavailable and huge queues.

The computer glitch, which also took out the BA website for two hours, comes after an outage in September of last year which followed four in the space of a month across June and July.

Around the world planes were grounded and passengers stuck either in terminal buildings or on planes themselves, as a shortage of available gates meant incoming passengers had no opportunity to disembark.

Customers across the world have been tweeting the company complaining they have been waiting to get off their flights for up to three hours.