Happy chickens take flight to East Midlands after IT issues divide the group

Happy chickens take flight to East Midlands after IT issues divide the group

Vaseline

Image caption, Six of the 13-person bachelor party missed their original flight due to delays while their luggage was being manually processed

  • Author, Owen Schipton
  • Role, BBC News, East Midlands Airport

A group of women on a bachelorette party were split up due to flight problems caused by global IT issues, but they will soon be reunited.

Some processes at East Midlands Airport, such as check-in and boarding, had to be carried out manually after a flaw in a software update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike caused global issues.

The group of 13 were scheduled to fly from the airport to Dublin, but six of them who had to check in luggage were delayed and missed their flight.

Despite everything, they were able to book a later flight and will meet the bride-to-be and six others who left earlier on Friday.

Image caption, Around 20,000 passengers were expected to travel through East Midlands Airport on one of the busiest days of the year

Anna Hindmarsh was among the six who missed the original flight.

She told the BBC she was “very disheartened”.

“They didn’t receive the papers for our flight in time,” she said.

But the group – including the bridesmaid – were determined to come and managed to catch a later flight for the four-day bachelorette party.

On Friday evening they join the rest of the group, after a long wait at the airport.

The chickens that had arrived in Dublin earlier had told their stranded friends that they were ‘moving on’.

Image caption, The bride reached Dublin on the original flight

Earlier, airport spokesman Ioan Reed-Aspley told the BBC the outage was likely affecting the IT system used by handling company Swissport to check in passengers and board planes.

He said: “Normally that is done digitally, but their IT systems are down so those processes have to be done manually.

“Fortunately for us, most of the departures have taken place this morning. We have a few planes on the ground at the moment, but the vast majority of passengers have departed.”

An airport spokesman later said no flights would be cancelled, but added that delays were possible.

Image caption, Airport spokesman Ioan Reed-Aspley advised passengers to check their flight with the airline

Some retailers at the airport were unable to process card payments due to the problem.

On Friday, cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted that the issue was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.

Microsoft has said it is taking “mitigating actions” to address the “ongoing impact” of the outage.