Malaga Airport returns to normal after 20 flight delays and nine cancellations due to global IT failure

Long waits for check-in, delayed flights and some cancelled flights, and problems paying with credit cards, accessing banks and even filling up at petrol stations. These were some of the consequences of a global computer failure sparked by a software upgrade, which has caused numerous incidents at the Malaga Airport and at banks and businesses of all kinds along the Costa del Sol and throughout Malaga province.

«The check-in queues are terrible», said a couple of flight passengers, shortly after they made it past the check-in desks on their way to the security screening area. In fact, airline staff were passing through the queues to «rescue» customers from the flights closest to departure, in order to give them priority in the boarding process. The fact is that the computer crashes meant that when it came time to check in, the process had to be done again by hand, as it used to be years ago. Among passengers, the greatest fear was that their luggage would get lost, which led to an increase in the demand for plastic baggage wrapping services.

The thousands of passengers on the almost 600 flights scheduled yesterday - a particularly busy day due to the change of fortnight for the holidays - were the most affected by the worldwide IT collapse of computer systems. In addition, as it is a global network, although there was less of an impact in Malaga, it was affected by the fact that other European hubs temporarily cancelled their operations, both arrivals and departures.

For this reason, the control tower was forced to impose «temporary regulations on arrivals for a few hours, with the aim of avoiding a collapse in the aircraft parking aprons», according to Enaire sources.

Apart from the queues and waits, which the people affected took with resignation and there was no nervousness, in general there were no widespread delays in departures and arrivals. There were more than twenty flights with delays of varying times, while Aena recognised only nine cancelled flights to or from Malaga, all of them domestic connections: to Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Fuerteventura and Ibiza.

In terms of delays, there were some very striking cases. One flight to Bristol in the UK (one of the most affected countries) was rescheduled from 10.25am to 11pm. Another to Gdansk (Poland), from 10.15am to 2.50pm; Amsterdam (three-hour wait); Eindhoven (also in the Netherlands, from 11.10am to 1.10pm), and Liège (Belgium), from 11.20am to 1pm.

Some Aena sources went so far as to state that Malaga Airport behaved «normally» today, with a situation similar to that of any other busy day in July and August.

On the other hand, other airport professionals consulted were not of the same opinion. In one of the terminals, a technician from the same company explained the situation as follows: «In Malaga we have been quite badly affected because we have full capacity at this time of year. There are delays in check-in and flights, as well as problems in the car parks and in the transport of goods».

The good news is that, while some other European airports were closed, Malaga continued to operate relatively normally throughout the day and flights generally remained on schedule, both for arrivals and departures, with only a few delays and long waits for check-in. «There are no cancellations, except in a few rare cases. We are going slowly but making progress because manual check-in is being done,» added the worker.