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British Airways website and app back in action after ‘planned maintenance’

BA.com was offline for some hours, before returning at around 2pm BST

Simon Calder
Travel Correspondent
Wednesday 05 May 2021 15:03 BST
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Making contact: British Airways Boeing 787 at Heathrow
Making contact: British Airways Boeing 787 at Heathrow

The British Airways website and app are back online after being down for several hours due to “planned improvements”.

For much of Wednesday until 2pm BST, people hoping to book tickets, check in online or monitor flight arrivals and departures on ba.com were told: “We’ll be back soon.

“Both ba.com and our apps are temporarily unavailable while we make some planned improvements to our systems.

“You can still check in at the airport as normal if you’re travelling in the next few hours.”

BA recommended people seek flight information “from the website of your departure airport”.

Users of the airline’s app were told: “We are unable to log you in. Please try again. If the problem persists visit ba.com or call your local contact centre.”

A spokesperson for British Airways said: “We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

BA has suffered repeatedly from IT failures in recent years.

In May 2017, around 75,000 passengers were stranded after a power problem disabled the departure control system. British Airways cancelled about 800 flights from Gatwick and Heathrow as a result of the failure, incurring losses of £58m.

The following year, cyber criminals hacked the payment details of hundreds of thousands of customers who had booked direct with the airline.

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