Thousands of BA passengers face delays of up to 22 hours due to ‘technical glitch’

Passengers on flights to Gatwick from the Caribbean and Mexico are facing the longest delays

British Airways passengers are facing delays of up to 22 hours (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Thousands of British Airways passengers face cancellations or delays of up to 22 hours after another “technical issue” wrecked some of the airline’s long-haul schedules.

Passengers on flights to Gatwick from the Caribbean and Mexico are facing the longest delays. The overnight flight from the Jamaican capital, Kingston, is running 22 hours late and is not expected to arrive until Friday morning, after the crew when “out of hours” while waiting for departure clearance.

The service from Cancun to Gatwick is 21 hours late for the same reason.

Many other arrivals at the Sussex airport are delayed by two hours or more, including two flights from Barbados, and one each from Antigua, Bermuda and New York.

Passengers from Las Vegas will touch down at Gatwick nearly six hours late. As a result of the disarray, Thursday’s outbound schedules have been disrupted. One Orlando flight has been cancelled, and passengers to Antigua, Barbados, Cancun, Mauritius, St Lucia and Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic are facing long delays.

At Heathrow, 17 long-haul arrivals are two hours or more behind schedule. The main problems are on flights form the east coast of the US, with five inbound jets from New York at least three hours late.

Services from Brazil and Canada are also badly affected.

The worst delay is the inbound from Pittsburgh to Heathrow, which will arrive over 12 hours late at 9.40pm.

Many Heathrow passengers were supposed to be connecting to other flights. With an estimated 4,000 BA travellers likely to arrive hours late, finding alternative connections will prove difficult.

A spokesperson for British Airways said: “Our teams are working hard to resolve a technical issue which has affected some of our flights, and we have rebooked customers onto alternative flights and offered hotel accommodation where they were unable to continue their journeys last night.

“We plan to operate a full flight schedule today. There may be some knock-on delays to flights and we are advising customers to check ba.com for the latest flight information.

“​We are sorry for the disruption to customers who have been affected.”

Outbound flights from Heathrow to Los Angeles, Miami, Nassau, New York JFK, Shanghai and Washington DC are delayed by around two hours.

Long-haul passengers who arrive at their final destinations four hours or more behind schedule are entitled to compensation of €600 (£515). For delays between three and four hours, the payout is halved.

The chaos is the latest in a number of costly IT failures for BA. Tens of thousands of passengers were caught up in disruption in August 2019, and after the airline suffered a major computer failure in May 2017 it cancelled all flights from Gatwick and Heathrow over a bank holiday weekend.

In September 2018, BA revealed tens of thousands of passengers had had their personal and financial details stolen by hackers in a data breach. The airline was fined £183m for failing to keep the information secure.