Easyjet has denied that its website fell victim to a cyber attack following a Europe-wide system failure on Tuesday (October 15).
The airline faces a big compensation bill after its system shut down from 11.00 to around 2.000, affecting hundreds of flights.
An Easyjet spokeswoman denied speculation that the carrier had been targeted by hackers. “It is one of those things that happens, it was just a systems failure,” she said.
She declined to put a figure on how much compensation the carrier would be liable for, but added: “We will pay any compensation that is due under EU 261 rules to any of our passengers that needed to find hotel accommodation and out of pocket expenses will also be reimbursed.”
The crash highlighted the dependency that no-frills airlines have on customers checking in online, as they do not have enough staff at airports to cope when situations like this arise.
Staff were forced to check in bags manually some Gatwick flights delayed by around two hours with inbound aircraft having to queue because stands were occupied by flights which were unable to depart.
“We are 100 per cent online check-in, but we did deploy extra resources at airports where we could,” said the Easyjet spokeswoman. “We will adopt all lessons learned.”
Gatwick was most affected, with 142 outbound and 143 inbound services impacted, but flights from Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow were also subject to delays.
However, the airline said there were only 24 cancellations in total across its entire network despite the technical problems
A Gatwick spokesman said: “Due to an Easyjet technical issue across Europe yesterday, passengers were being manually checked in. Unfortunately this meant that the check-in process took longer than usual.”
He added that the situation was now back to normal.