75,000 British holidaymakers hit as IT calamity cancels almost 500 UK flights

Thousands of passengers across the UK have faced fresh cancellations and delays to flights as airlines recover from the impact of one of the largest global IT outages ever.

Dozens of flights were axed on Saturday, with data showing 73 cancellations by 4pm on Saturday, in addition to the more than 400 flights that were grounded on Friday. That represents around 75,000 passengers across the two days who were booked to fly are not where they intended to be.

More than 9,000 flights around the world have been cancelled so far, according to aviation analyst Cirium.

Worst affected on Saturday were travellers on British Airways to and from London Heathrow, with easyJet grounding eight flights to and from London Gatwick.

“We are stuck in Tenerife where it seems Tui have abandoned us.” So said Sarah Murdoch, one of an estimated 6,000 holidaymakers whose trips with the giant travel firm have become unexpectedly prolonged due to the outage affecting Windows systems.

“Waited at the airport for hours with no Tui rep in sight. We had to arrange our own accommodation and we are flying back tonight with Jet2.” Tui says all its customers overseas are being looked after by resort teams.

At least Ms Murdoch had enjoyed the holiday she booked before the CloudStrike IT “upgrade” – which Microsoft said had impacted 8.5 million Windows devices – put paid to her homebound journey.

Thousands more had their long-anticipated package holidays with Tui summarily cancelled.

Tui was hit even harder than the major UK airlines because its crewing system was directly hit by the software calamity. On what was expected to be the busiest day this decade for flights from UK airports, Tui cancelled 64 flights.

To avoid the situation becoming unmanageable, Tui took the remarkable step of cancelling thousands of holidays – an act which will cost the company millions of pounds in forfeited revenue, as well as lost goodwill from disappointed customers.

The company, Europe’s biggest travel firm, is offering them vouchers for future trips in addition to full refunds or switching to holidays going ahead on advantageous terms.

But even customers whose holidays have not been cancelled are experiencing severe disruption. Tui passengers at Manchester expecting to depart for Cancun in Mexico at noon on…