LONDON — A technical failure left British Airways flights on Monday evening facing delays and disruption across Europe.

The flag carrier, owned by British-Spanish multinational airline holding IAG, reportedly suffered a systems outage at the main operations center in Heathrow and temporarily lost communication with aircraft across the region.

Reports said the pilots were not able to send flight plans electronically and had to manually call the operations center.

A British Airways spokesperson told Euronews Business that "a technical issue affecting some of our operational systems meant that for a short period on Monday, we were unable to depart flights as quickly as usual," adding that the airline's backup network helped get the main systems "back online within an hour".

The problems started around 5 pm on Monday, reportedly affecting thousands of British Airways passengers, some of whom were stranded on the tarmac in various airports in the UK, as well as abroad.

Passengers also posted on social media about being stuck in Verona, Italy.

The delays affected both domestic and international flights with flights to European destinations being held by up to two hours

BA owner IAG was reported as saying the problem had been fixed much more speedily than in the past because of extra investment in IT.

"We've made significant investment in our IT infrastructure, putting in £750m to replace legacy systems to help prevent outages and recover more quickly when they do occur, which is exactly what happened here," a BA spokesperson said.

"We never want to inconvenience customers. We’ve apologized to those who did face delays and we're grateful to them for their patience, as well as our colleagues who worked so hard to resolve this issue and support customers."

It's not the first time the airline has been affected by systems failures in recent years. It suffered problems in May 2023 and, before that, in August 2019 and May 2017.

Share prices in IAG were down 2.9% in trading on Tuesday afternoon. — Euronews