British Airways Systems Down, Causing Worldwide Delays

UPDATE: 2:10 a.m. EDT — British Airways, whose check-in systems went down Monday evening, affecting flyers across the world, said it would check in “customers as normal at Heathrow and Gatwick” on Tuesday morning. Both those airports are in London, and there is still no word from the company about its operations at airports in other cities and countries.

The airline also hasn’t said anything yet about why the problem happened, except to say its “IT teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.”

Original story:

In the early hours of Tuesday in the United Kingdom (Monday evening on the East Coast), the country’s national carrier, British Airways, suffered a system malfunction that affected its fliers throughout the world. By 8 p.m. EDT, there were already long queues and thousands of frustrated passengers at airports around the world.

As of midnight EDT, the only statement from the airline was on their Twitter page, which said: “Our IT teams are working as hard as they can to quickly fix a problem with our check-in system. We’re sorry for the delays our customers are facing as they check-in for flights.”

In response to a passenger, the airline also revealed it had been facing “some intermittent system problems in the last 24 hours.” The company also said it is “doing everything possible to check in customers for their journey.”

In some cases, that meant writing up boarding passes by hand.

There seem to be no cancellations so far, however. Numerous flights around the world have been delayed, including many in the United States.

The outage comes at the end of the Labor Day long weekend, affecting numerous travel plans. The airline had suffered a similar outage late May, affecting thousands of its flights. In August, a power failure at Delta Air Lines’ Atlanta hub had knocked out its systems, leading to cancellations and delays.