AER LINGUS SAYS that the system outage that led to mass flight cancellations was caused by a fibre optic cable being damaged by construction in the UK.

Over 50 flights were cancelled by the airline last Saturday due to “major” errors with the company’s online system, leaving Aer Lingus unable to check-in, board or access mandatory flight information for nearly 10 hours.

“For almost 10 hours on Saturday we had no access to our core operational and customer system. We couldn’t check-in, board, access mandatory flight information, access data on customer bookings or access customer contact information,” said a spokesperson for Aer Lingus.

“Key processes for our contact centre, website and digital applications were also unavailable. This meant that we had limited ability to communicate with our customers and provide the service and information we know you needed.”

The airline has said that the issue was caused by construction work in the UK damaging a fibre optic cable that provides connectivity to Aer Lingus’ systems.

“Aer Lingus has a contract with a leading cloud services provider to host the network and infrastructure behind our core operational and customer system,” added the spokesperson.

“Their internet services provider in the UK had a major failure in their network when, early on Saturday morning, unrelated construction work damaged one of the fibre optic cables which provide connection to Aer Lingus’ systems.”

The spokesperson added that a component within the airline’s back-up system failed, with the cable only being repaired at 5.30pm on Saturday.

“Both have now been fixed and measures have been put in place which should prevent an outage of this type happening again.”

The airline has since apologised to customers, with a letter from the company’s Chief Executive, Lynne Embleton, being sent to anyone who was impacted.

Aer Lingus Aer Lingus

“Aer Lingus is very conscious of the impact this had on its customers.  Staff at Aer Lingus made huge efforts on the day to try to help customers in what were very difficult circumstances, adding extra resources to rebook customers, reunite bags with customers.  The company is now processing refunds as quickly as we can,” added the spokesperson.