Flight delayed at Barcelona airport due to IT outage? All you need to know

A major IT outage caused widespread disruption worldwide on Friday, affecting companies, banks, and airlines.

The issue with the Windows operating system led to numerous delays at Barcelona airport.

For those affected, consumer protection organizations have provided the following advice:

If your flight is delayed by more than five hours, you are entitled to claim a refund of the full ticket price or an alternative flight on dates agreed upon with the airline.

In the case of a cancellation, the refund must be processed within a maximum of seven days.

In both scenarios, passengers are also entitled to assistance with food, drink, accommodation, and transportation if necessary.

However, additional compensation beyond the flight refund cannot be claimed, as the incident is classified as a force majeure event, similar to severe weather conditions.

'Airport collapsed'

The Barcelona "airport is collapsed," Jordi, a passenger traveling to Venice, told the Catalan News Agency (ACN). Even though he is traveling with a large suitcase, he will let the airline crew take care of the luggage once he is next to the plane before boarding.

Meanwhile, Diana, from Ecuador, was traveling from Barcelona to Paris during her European tour during her summer holidays. The airline's check-in team wrote her boarding pass by hand so that she could go through security and board the flight.

"I do not feel safe. It is worrying," Diana said to ACN. She is traveling with hand luggage, which makes everything easier. "We avoided a large queue, but we do not know if we will be able to board with this paper."

One of her worries is that the situation will continue to impact her during her trip across Europe.

Why has this happened?

The outage is part of a global IT issue which is also impacting airports worldwide: Berlin, Brisbane (Australia), Edinburgh (Scotland), Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and London, among others, as well as media companies like UK's Sky News. 

The incident is due to an update from CrowdStrike that does not properly adapt to Windows, and the company has already announced it has deployed a fix.

Aena, Spain's airport authority, reported that the outage mainly impacted check-in and information desks. 

However, around midday, the company announced they were "recovering some of the systems," and while all "airports are operating, some processes can take longer than usual, which is causing several delays," Aena shared in a statement.

Early in the day, Aena had put in force some contingency plans to keep up with all flight operations and "at the moment, these are following the day's schedule, with some delays."

Departures and landings have been "delayed," but these are slowly recovering their expected schedule, "but there has not been any service halt," Aena added.