British Airways passengers suffer flight delays due to another IT glitch affecting London Heathrow

British Airways has found its operations at London Heathrow Airport blighted by another IT systems outage that has left flights grounded for several hours on 30 March at Terminal 5.

Based on the output of the British Airways flight status tracker page, this latest round of technical difficulties appears to have started on the afternoon of Wednesday 30 March 2022, with many of the flights listed past 2pm onwards as being delayed.

Many of the passengers caught up in the incident have taken to the social media site Twitter to air their frustrations at the delays to their journey, as well as the lack of updates from British Airways about what is going on.

One user, who was posting from Heathrow Terminal 5, said none of the planes at the airport are able to board passengers, and the communication systems that pilots use to de-board their planes are inaccessible.

“Stuck on a plane at Heathrow Terminal 3 owing to the outage,” wrote another. “The [British Airways] infrastructure is awful.”

Meanwhile, another passenger, making reference to the other outages the airline has suffered recently, added: “Yet another IT failure, can we place have some honesty this time as to what the problem is and how long it will take to fix, rather than the shambles of last time, or should we all just give up now and go home?”

At the time of writing, neither British Airways nor the official London Heathrow Twitter account had posted any updates or guidance to passengers about the matter. 

However, Computer Weekly contacted British Airways for a comment on this story, and it confirmed in a statement that the issue has now been resolved and normal service is resuming.

“We experienced a technical issue for a short time this afternoon which affected our operation at Heathrow Terminal 5. This has now been resolved and we’re resuming flight operations. We’ve apologised to those customers who have been inconvenienced,” the statement said.

News of this latest technical difficulty comes several weeks after the airline was forced to cancel a number of weekend short-haul flights out of London Heathrow Airports due to an unspecified IT issue that rendered parts of its website and mobile apps inaccessible to passengers.

It also follows on from details emerging about an internal memo being circulated among the airline’s staff from its CEO Sean Doyle that is reported to have stated that the airline will need to cancel flights over the next few weeks to prevent further IT issues, according to a report seen on the Daily Mail.