LONDON: British Air­ways cancelled all flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Saturday as a global IT failure upended the travel plans of tens of thousands of people on a busy UK holiday weekend.

The airline said it was suffering a “major IT systems failure” around the world. It didn’t say what was causing the problem but said there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

BA operates hundreds of flights from the two London airports on a typical day and both are major hubs for worldwide travel.

Several hours after problems began cropping up on Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6pm because the two airports had become severely congested. The airline later scrapped flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of the day.

The airline said it was working to restore services out of Heathrow and Gatwick beginning on Sunday, although some disruption is expected. It said it expected that London-bound long-haul flights would land on schedule on Sunday.

The problem comes on a bank holiday weekend, when tens of thousands of Britons and their families are travelling.

Passengers at Heathrow reported long lines at check-in counters and the failure of both the airline’s website and its mobile app. BA said the crash also affected its call centres.

Passenger Phillip Norton tweeted video of an announcement from a pilot to passengers at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, saying the problem affects the system that regulates what passengers and baggage go on which aircraft. The pilot said passengers on planes that have landed at Heathrow were unable to get off because there was nowhere to park.

One person posted a picture on Twitter of BA staff writing gate numbers on a white board.

“We’ve tried all of the self-check-in machines. None were working, apart from one,” said Terry Page, booked on a flight to Texas. “There was a huge queue for it and it later transpired that it didn’t actually work, but you didn’t discover that until you got to the front.”

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2017