Thousands of passengers across the UK have faced fresh cancellations and delays to flights as airlines recover from the impact of one of the largest global IT outages ever.
Dozens of flights were axed on Saturday, with data showing 73 cancellations by 4pm on Saturday, in addition to the more than 400 flights that were grounded on Friday. That represents around 75,000 passengers across the two days who were booked to fly are not where they intended to be.
More than 9,000 flights around the world have been cancelled so far, according to aviation analyst Cirium.
Worst affected on Saturday were travellers on British Airways to and from London Heathrow, with easyJet grounding eight flights to and from London Gatwick.
“We are stuck in Tenerife where it seems Tui have abandoned us.” So said Sarah Murdoch, one of an estimated 6,000 holidaymakers whose trips with the giant travel firm have become unexpectedly prolonged due to the outage affecting Windows systems.
“Waited at the airport for hours with no Tui rep in sight. We had to arrange our own accommodation and we are flying back tonight with Jet2.” Tui says all its customers overseas are being looked after by resort teams.
At least Ms Murdoch had enjoyed the holiday she booked before the CloudStrike IT “upgrade” – which Microsoft said had impacted 8.5 million Windows devices – put paid to her homebound journey.
Thousands more had their long-anticipated package holidays with Tui summarily cancelled.
Tui was hit even harder than the major UK airlines because its crewing system was directly hit by the software calamity. On what was expected to be the busiest day this decade for flights from UK airports, Tui cancelled 64 flights.
To avoid the situation becoming unmanageable, Tui took the remarkable step of cancelling thousands of holidays – an act which will cost the company millions of pounds in forfeited revenue, as well as lost goodwill from disappointed customers.
The company, Europe’s biggest travel firm, is offering them vouchers for future trips in addition to full refunds or switching to holidays going ahead on advantageous terms.
But even customers whose holidays have not been cancelled are experiencing severe disruption. Tui passengers at Manchester expecting to depart for Cancun in Mexico at noon on Saturday discovered their Boeing 787 was going to fit in a short hop to Palma de Mallorca and back – delaying the transatlantic trip by at least eight hours.
Many people took to social media to complain – and were immediately pounced upon by scammers who set up dozens of “imposter accounts” on X/Twitter in a bid to defraud frustrated travellers. CrowdStrike warned of the threat of criminals seeking to exploit the fallout from the outage to their advantage. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the equivalent of the UK’s GCHQ, also issued an alert about hackers sending out bogus software fixes claiming to be CrowdStrike.
A spokesperson for Tui said: “Due to the global IT issue at airports and airlines around the world, TUI’s overall service level was heavily impacted and we would like to apologise to everyone affected.
“Whilst the original IT issue was outside of our control, an essential system needed to run our airline operation remained unstable late into [Friday] night. We therefore made the difficult decision to cancel a number of outbound flights and delayed a number of inbound flights returning to the UK.
“We are very sorry to all those customers impacted as we understand how disappointing this would have been and recognise that many customers were already at the airport waiting for their departure.”
The 64 Tui departures grounded on Friday represented one in six of the flights cancelled to, from and within the UK, according to aviation analyst Cirium.
European air passengers’ rights rules specify that any airline cancelling a flight must provide stranded travellers with an alternative means of reaching their destination as soon as possible, plus a hotel and meals while they wait.
In practice, though, at times of severe disruption, airlines pass on their obligation to the passenger – leaving travellers to find a room and an alternative flight home.
Carriers will collectively have lost millions of pounds over what was supposed to be the most lucrative time of the year.
Beyond the travel industry, NHS England has warned of “continued disruption” to GP services into next week off the back of the IT outage. Across England, GP surgeries reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records on Friday as their Emis appointment and patient record system went down.
NHS England said on Saturday afternoon that its systems were “coming back online in most areas” but “still running slightly slower than usual”.
An NHS spokesperson said: “As practices recover from the loss of IT systems on Friday, there may be some continued disruption, particularly to GP services, in some areas into next week as practices work to rebook appointments.
“The advice for Monday remains that patients should attend appointments as normal unless told otherwise.”
The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) said that patients collecting prescriptions could still face disruption this weekend.
Nick Kaye, chairman of the NPA, which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, said: “Systems are by and large back online and medicine deliveries have resumed in many community pharmacies today after the global IT outage.
“However, yesterday’s outage will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.”