BA Confirms Website Problems Due To Snow Demand

British Airways has confirmed to that its main website is “operating intermittently” on Monday, due the sheer number of visitors it is dealing with because of the travel chaos caused by the snow.

“The website is operating and has the latest details on there,” a BA spokesperson told eWEEK Europe on the phone. BA was also at pains to point visitors to other sources of information.

Under pressure

“BA also has a Twitter page that is operating fine,” said the spokesperson. “We are fully aware of the problem with our main website, and our teams are under high pressure to resolve these issues.” The spokesperson said she could not at this time confirm when the issue would be resolved.

It seems that the website has been either loading very slowly – or not all – since Monday morning, as the airline deals with web requests from passengers around the world, who are struggling to find out if their flights are going ahead following the rolling cancellations at most major UK airports.

Website demand

The BA website is the not the only website to be caught out by unexpected demand. Back in July for example, Transport for London (TfL) suspended access to its London Underground live data feed after it was swamped by “overwhelming demand by mobile phones apps.”

It has previously envisaged it would be back online within a couple of days, but TFL eventually restored the data feed nearly six months later after it moved Trackernet so that it was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. This cloud server is scalable and is therefore better able to cope with varying demand.

However the BA website failure comes almost a year after air travel was severely disrupted across Europe, when it and other websites were tested to the limit by stranded people looking for alternative routes home, following the eruption the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano.