Furious Liz Hurley 'stranded with no food and water' after British Airways flight delayed by technical issue

20 December 2022, 13:13

Liz Hurley has vented her frustration after she was stranded at an airport in Antigua after her British Airways flight was delayed.

The Hollywood actor and model complained that she'd been left "with no food or water" as she waited on the Caribbean island.

"Stranded at Antigua airport with no food or water, taxis or hotels offered yet," she tweeted this morning. "Plane delayed 20 hours."

An hour later she added: "Still stranded- no food, water or hotel. Pretty dodgy service."

British Airways responded quickly, blaming the delay on a "technical issue with our flight planning".

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A British Airways flight from Antigua was scheduled to touch down at London Gatwick today at 9.10am, but it's now not expected to arrive until 5.25am tomorrow.

Since yesterday night, at least 18 flights in and out of London's Heathrow have been cancelled, impacting routes that serve the US and Canada.

There are also severe delays to a number of other flights serving Gatwick and Heathrow, including arrivals from the US city Philadelphia and Cancun, which are expected to arrive over five hours behind schedule.

A spokesperson for the firm tweeted: "We're experiencing delays to some of our flights due to a technical issue with our flight planning.

"We're sorry for the disruption to your journey, we're urgently investigating this so that you travel as soon as possible."

The carrier apologised to customers after the technical issue affected its flight planning systems, impacting flights from the US and elsewhere as Christmas approaches.

Some passengers took to social media to complain after the glitch grounded various long haul services ahead of their scheduled departure times.

British Airways said the technical issue didn't affect any departed flights or short haul services, and that the failure was not a safety issue.

At 08.15am it said that services were returning to normal.

"Our teams have now resolved a temporary issue that affected some of our long-haul flight planning systems overnight, which resulted in delays to our schedule.

"We're sorry for the disruption caused to our customers' travel plans."

It follows other high-profile IT failures for the airline in recent years that have hurt its reputation and recovery from the pandemic.

A previous issue in March resulted delays at London's Heathrow airport.

And only a month earlier, there were delays or cancellations for hundreds of flights because of an IT glitch, which was exacerbated by staff shortages.