All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
On Thursday morning, thousands of passengers departing from London's Heathrow Airport, the second busiest for international traffic in the world, were forced to fly without checked luggage after a computer system failure meant fliers could no longer check in any baggage. The airport announced at 6:45 a.m. that it was "experiencing an issue" with its baggage system in Terminals 3 and 5, and that passengers would have to travel without their checked luggage. Passengers were advised to "pack essential items in their hand luggage" and to get in touch with their airlines to coordinate getting their bags once they reached their destinations.
The problem appears to have been fixed by 9 a.m., but, according to the airport's timetable, in that interim, more than 60 planes departed, presumably with no extra weight in their cargo holds. While the airport apologized for the outage and assured worried Twitter users that things had returned to normal, they did not explain what caused the system failure.
A range of airlines, including American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Emirates, were affected by the outage, but by far the worst hit was British Airways, which uses Terminal 5 as its main base and also operates flights out of Terminal 3.
After the issue had been resolved, British Airways informed passengers that they were working to get bags left behind at Heathrow to their final destination in the coming days. "All of the delayed bags from the baggage system outage have now been sorted into destination order and the vast majority are planned to be flown from Heathrow on alternative flights throughout Thursday," reads the advisory. "Some cities are not served on a daily basis or only have one service per day." The airline is asking affected fliers to report their delayed baggage online, in order to avoid long lines at customer service desks. Additionally, the airline is offering reimbursement for the purchase of essential items left behind in suitcases.
It's been a turbulent couple of weeks for British Airways and technology. Two weeks ago, over Memorial Day weekend, the airline had to cancel around 1,000 flights out of Heathrow after a "power surge" disabled its call centers, website, and other communications. And British Airways hasn't been the only airline crippled by faulty technology—American, Delta and Southwest have all experienced massive system failures in the past two years that led to thousands of delayed or canceled flights.
This, a communications breakdown in an airport's computer system, is a reminder that the entire industry might need an IT overhaul—not just the airlines.