Technical Issue with British Airways Causes Flight Delays and Cancellations at London Heathrow

A technical issue with the British Airways systems at London Heathrow Airport (LHR) caused cancellations, delays, and baggage issues for hundreds of passengers on Wednesday.

Heathrow, which said it was supporting British Airways “with a technical issue with [its] allocation system,” said that only British Airways flights have been affected.

“Earlier British Airways experienced a technical issue with their Allocation System…We advise passengers to check with BA before travelling to the airport as BA passengers in Terminal 5 may still be impacted. No other airline is impacted,” the airport said in a statement on Tuesday.  

Most of the issues took place on Tuesday night around 6 p.m., with a majority of British Airways flights out of Heathrow at 6 p.m. local time getting canceled. The airline said it brought in more staff to deal with the fallout and to deal with passengers impacted by the outage. 

The issue, according to Heathrow, has since been resolved, but British Airways guests are still being impacted on Wednesday—according to FlightAware, 10% of all departures at Heathrow have been canceled, along with 8% of arrivals, amounting to more than 100 flights. That is along with passengers arriving at Terminal 5 missing baggage.

The airline is still telling passengers to check with the airline before heading to Heathrow.