Woman pays over £5,300 for tickets home after global Microsoft outage
She said she was so concerned about getting home she decided to pay £5,300 for her family to fly home later in the evening.
A US tourist has paid thousands of pounds for a new flight from Edinburgh after IT outages left them unable to contact airlines after their flight was cancelled.
A global IT outage affecting thousands of businesses has meant severe delays at airports and airlines.
Edinburgh appears to be the only Scottish airport severely impacted by the system outage, with staff urging those travelling to expect security waits of ‘around one hour’.
Texas resident Stephanie Thompson is among those affected after visiting the UK for Wimbledon and The Open Championship in Troon, with her 9.25am flight to Heathrow on Wednesday, and onward flight to Dallas, cancelled.
She said she was so concerned about getting home she decided to pay £5,300 for her family to fly home later in the evening.
She said: ‘It was supposed to leave at 9.25am and change in Heathrow at 11 and we were supposed to get into Dallas later today.
‘We couldn’t get an answer from anybody. British Airways kept hanging up saying we have too many calls right now. I was on hold with American (Airlines) for about an hour and 10 minutes before I finally hung up.
‘We just paid 6,800 dollars for a one-way trip home, hopefully leaving tonight. I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted something to get us home.’
Airports, train operators, banks, football clubs, news organisations and big companies in several other sectors have all been hit by a major worldwide IT outage.
Flights have either been grounded or ordered not to land while staff battle tech issues, which are also causing long queues of passengers yet to take off who are having to be checked in by hand.
GP surgeries have been left unable to access patient records or book appointments after the glitch locked them out of the central IT system.
Microsoft has offered an unusual solution to users suffering technical problems- reboot your machine 15 times.
Posting on its website earlier today, the company said it has received reports of some machines successfully recovering after repeated restarts.
It also suggested customers restore from a backup from before 7pm UTC yesterday, when it’s estimated the problems started.
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