Another side effect which was only reported by upset passengers but not confirmed by the airport staff was that the departure boards failed to update.
A Heathrow Airport spokesman confirmed the IT glitch but insisted that this was not the problem of any experienced delays. He explained that the pilots might have misinformed passengers who thought otherwise.
The official airport statement reads: “We are experiencing some disruption as a result of an issue with one of Heathrow Airport’s IT systems. We are working with the airport to resolve the matter and customers should check ba.com for the very latest information about their flights. We are sorry for any disruption to customers’ travel plans.”
Passengers were informed that the system “was back up and running” at 9pm but despite this claim many passengers still remained sitting in stationary airplanes as late as 1am. With over 1400 flights taking off and landing the Heathrow Airport and more than 200000 bags being handled through their security system it was more than normal that the experienced airport computer glitch generated a lot of complaints on social media sites.
Some of the tweets are listed below:
“Stuck on the plane New York bound, but not going anywhere. Computer crash to do with luggage..Great could be hours.. All #heathrow affected”, Andrea Cecile Cohen wrote.
“An hour and a half on the plane at #heathrow and counting! Why do they let us on when they know we aren’t going anywhere. And there is no guarantee our luggage will be there when we do eventually get there!! @EGYPTAIR @HeathrowAirport #heathrow”, Sally Silver
Read more Tweets about the incident at the following link: https://twitter.com/hashtag/heathrow?src=hash
