British Airways has cancelled dozens of flights to and from Heathrow, affecting at least 7,000 passengers, while around 3,000 more travellers have been stranded overnight abroad.
Problems began for BA when the control tower was closed for around 35 minutes on Thursday afternoon when a fire alarm was triggered. Landings and take-offs were stopped.
Then an IT issue emerged which caused further disruption for BA and other airlines.
Hundreds of flights were delayed, and some evening outbound departures were cancelled.
So far today, British Airways has cancelled 31 inbound flights to Heathrow, while a further 16 were delayed overnight at airports across the UK and Europe. One flight from Oslo is now expected to arrive early this evening, 20 hours late.
In addition, 11 outbound BA flights have been cancelled as a result of the disruption.
A spokesperson for British Airways said: “Our flights are operating today, however we expect some knock on disruption from yesterday’s combination of a temporary closure of Heathrow Airport’s air traffic control tower and a supplier system issue which affected a number of airlines.
“We are doing all we can to keep disruption to our services to a minimum, and are sorry for the disruption to our customers’ travel plans.”
In May 2017, BA suffered a massive computer system failure caused by a power supply issue. Tens of thousands of travellers had their journeys disrupted over a busy bank-holiday weekend.
Passengers on Ryanair face problems on Friday as well as next Wednesday and Thursday as a result of strikes by pilots and cabin crew.
