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Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

Flying from London? Add a few hours on for good measure

British Airways is getting its grovelling in early after a systems crash caused chaos at Heathrow and Gatwick airports earlier this morning.

The outage affected check-in desks at both the main London airports as well as the minor bizjet destination at London City Airport, with the inevitable hundreds of angry passengers taking to social media to air their ire at the airline.

BA's statement on the snafu said: "Customers are being checked in as normal after an earlier problem was resolved. We are sorry for the temporary check-in problems which caused some delays for our customers first thing this morning.

"This issue is now resolved and our staff are working flat out to help customers get away on their holidays."

Of the 80 BA flights scheduled to depart from Heathrow between 8 and 11am, 35 either departed late or were "delayed", according to the airline's own flight status page.

Inevitably one must compare the outage to the infamous BA meltdown of April, when both of its main data centres – primary and failover – went phut and caused the entire airline's operations to literally grind to a halt as its flights were grounded worldwide. Although informed sources came up with plausible theories about what happened, the actual cause has not been acknowledged by British Airways.

Related screwups by BA include a very similar systems outage barely a month ago, which had identical effects to this morning's collapse.

If you know why BA's shonky IT keeps going to sleep in the mornings, click the author's name at the top of this article and drop us a line. ®

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