EasyJet has had to cancel hundreds of flights after an IT-related setback caused problems with their computer systems.

The budget airline apologised for the problems on social media and advised customers to check their booking before going to the airport.

Issues with their IT system have affected flights set for departure between 12pm and 2pm GMT, the low-cost carrier said.

In a statement on Twitter, EasyJet apologised to those customers whose flights were affected by IT system issues.

“Our team of IT specialists is working to restore the systems as soon as possible,” easyJet said.

The company had earlier said in a statement that “flights due to depart between 1pm and 3pm UK time today may be impacted”.

“We advise customers due to travel with us today to continue to check Flight Tracker to check the status of their flight before making their way to the airport,” the firm added.

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Twitter is alight with customers angry with their late flight cancellations. EasyJet customers located in both in the UK and Europe have been left in airports hours before their flight were due to leave.

EasyJet said: “We advise customers due to travel with us today to continue to check Flight Tracker to check the status of their flight before making their way to the airport.

“We apologise for the inconvenience caused and would like to thank customers for their patience as we work to resolve this as soon as possible.”

Commenting on the news, Ross Gray, CEO, Cloudsoft, said the outage shows us that no company’s IT infrastructure is “too advanced to fail” – even one that supports flights for millions of people.

“When a company’s critical IT systems go down, quick recovery is vital. This becomes more and more difficult due to the increasing complexity of ‘hybrid IT’ environments most business find themselves operating. Complexity-induced vulnerability is creating more and more high-profile and expensive downtime situations; which will only increase as the pressure on organisations to digitally transform continues,” Gray said.

“Yesterday’s downtime for EasyJet serves as a reminder as to why the EU is developing new regulations around Digital Operational Resilience – commonly known as DORA – and why the UK is taking similar steps, too. If a similar issue were to occur in the financial services sector, it could cause huge repercussions (including financial and reputational) across the industry.

“Just this week, the Bank of England said it was expecting to have “challenging conversations” with banks about their operational resilience; the resulting chaos seen in airports up and down the country as a result of this IT outage will no doubt be weighing on the minds of many involved in writing these regulations and those set to be affected by it.”

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