British Airways rolled out a ‘cost effective’ IT system in October 2015.
But since its launch, the system has caused a host of problems costing the company more than £100 million.
Workers say it crashes ‘all the time’ and check-in staff are regularly reduced to tears by its glitches.
– The new BA ‘FLY’ system first broke down on June 19 2015, just weeks after first being introduced.
– The system then suffered another failure on July 7, 2016. Two-hour, seven-lane queues formed at all BA check-in gates at Terminal 5 at London Heathrow.
– Less than a week later and the check-in system broke down yet again. On July 13, lengthy queues formed once again at Terminal 5, Heathrow, after the ‘FLY’ system suffered further technical problems
– Five days later it broke down once again and on this occasion TV presenter Phillip Schofield was among those to berate the airline for the delays. The IT glitch also hit Gatwick and caused huge queues as hundreds of thousands of families start going away for their summer holidays. Long queues snaked across terminal buildings as irate passengers said BA workers were nowhere to be seen or ‘pretending to be on the phone’.
– In May 2017 an IT engineer allegedly failed to follow proper procedure at a Heathrow data centre and caused ‘catastrophic physical damage’ to servers leaving 75,000 stranded across the globe. The outage lasted just 15 minutes but it stopped online check-in, grounded planes and broke baggage systems and meant BA was unable to resume a full schedule for four days. More than 670 flights were cancelled, costing the company £80 million.
– There were seven BA system failures in total in 2017. Crashes on June 19, July 7, July 13, July 18 and again on August 2, meant huge delays and cancellations for its customers.
– In 2018 furious passengers blasted BA after airline cancels tickets to the Middle East they bought months ago saying fliers should have realised the £167-return deals were a glitch.
– In July 2019 British Airways was told it will have to pay a record £183million fine for a data breach that saw card details of more than 380,000 customers stolen from its website and app.
– Days later holidaymakers headed overseas for their summer break had to leave their bags behind at Heathrow Airport following problems with luggage handling systems. Passengers including former comedian Eddie Izzard tweeted their frustration and posted pictures of cases piling up in the luggage hall.
– In August 2019 A British Airways‘ IT meltdown caused 12 hours of chaos for 20,000 stranded passengers.
The airline was branded ‘pathetic’ after customers at Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Manchester, Edinburgh and Newcastle airports were told to ‘go home’ and reschedule after its check-in system collapsed. The IT crash at 4.30am – the third in as many weeks – led to 127 cancellations and another 300 delays.