Thousands delayed as BA flights disrupted by 'technical issue'

Thousands of passengers have been delayed in their travel due to a disruption experienced by British Airways after an overnight computer failure that impacted its services.

The airline said overnight that a small number of flights had been affected by the glitch.

It later confirmed: "Our teams are working hard to resolve a technical issue which is affecting some of our flights, and we have rebooked customers onto alternative flights and offered hotel accommodation where they have been unable to continue their journeys last night.

"We are very sorry for the disruption to their travel plans."

BA said mid-morning on Thursday that “there may be some knock-on delays to flights and we are advising customers to check ba.com for the latest flight information."

The carrier had yet to confirm the total number of flights that had been impacted by the outage.

About 45 flights due to land at Heathrow were delayed by more than 45 minutes by 0900 GMT and the worst affected flight was expected to arrive over 12 hours late.

BA said it was assisting affected customers to sort out alternative arrangements.

This is the latest in a series of systems failures to hit the airline in recent months. In August, an IT glitch led to the cancellation of over 100 flights and disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers.