Aer Lingus has cancelled all UK flights scheduled to leave Dublin Airport after 2pm as an ongoing IT issue wreaks havoc.
Earlier today, passengers with the Irish airline faced "chaos" as an IT issue reportedly prevented passengers from checking in, with images being posted on social media showing hundreds of people queueing up to check in bags. Dozens of flights have been severely delayed, including a flight from Dublin to Manchester that was supposed to leave at 10.15am.
Dublin Airport's live departure information, and third party flight trackers, both say the 10.15am flight is still waiting to take off, with no time estimate given for when the flight might depart. A second flight was scheduled to leave at 3.15pm, but will be affected by the cancellations.
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Aer Lingus have given our sister site the Irish Mirror an update on the situation, saying that they can't contact passengers directly due to the issue, and have instead asked passengers not to arrive at the airport. The spokesperson said: "Due to a major incident with a network provider, our cloud-based systems enabling check-in, boarding and our website are currently unavailable.
"A UK network provider servicing the cloud-based system has experienced a major break in connectivity impacting both primary and secondary connectivity. At this time the provider has not been able to give Aer Lingus an estimate of the time when the break in connectivity will be restored. Unfortunately, this is causing severe disruption to Aer Lingus services today.
"Consequently, all flights originally scheduled to depart from Dublin Airport for European and United Kingdom destinations from 2.00pm onwards today have had to be cancelled. As we are currently unable to communicate directly with customers, we are asking customers booked to travel on those flights not to come to Dublin Airport."
The airline sincerely apologised to all customers impacted by today’s disruption and cancellations and say they will be able to change their travel plans free-of-charge. The spokesperson added: "Any customer impacted by today’s disruptions will be able to change their travel plans, free of charge either through our call centre or social media channels. We will advise customers when IT systems are restored and this change option is fully available to our customers.
"As soon as systems are restored our teams will work to re-accommodate those impacted as efficiently as possible, and share information regarding customers’ rights and the airlines’ obligations under Regulation (EC) 261/2004. We are working intensively with our system partners and their network partners to resolve the connection issues as soon as possible."
Earlier today, Images began surfacing on social media today showing hundreds of people in queues waiting to check their bags before heading off later today. One passenger took to Twitter to suggest that it is a company-wide issue and that engineers are actively working to resolve the problem. The person wrote: “There are company wide IT issues with @AerLingus preventing any check ins at Dublin airport that their “engineers are hoping to fix” the whole place is rammed.”
They then continued by posting directly to Aer Lingus and said: “Fancy telling us what’s going on?” Another said: “Chaos at @DublinAirport with all @AerLingus systems down since 8am. No checkin, no boarding. Queue now outside the airport.” A third simply wrote: “Chaos in Dublin Airport again.”
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