Data Breach Hits British Airways Website

British Airways has suffered another IT problem, with hundreds of thousands of customer details stolen from its website.

The airline said personal and financial details of customers making bookings on its website and app were stolen “in recent weeks”. The exact timeframe of the bookings affected is not clear but the data breach was between August 21 and September 5.

BA assured customers that the breach had been resolved and the website was working normally. The stolen data did not include travel or passport details, the airline said.

About 380,000 transactions were affected by the breach and police and relevant authorities have been notified.

British Airways chief executive Alex Cruz said: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption that this criminal activity has caused. We take the protection of our customers’ data very seriously.”

The Heathrow-based airline said it is communicating with affected customers and advised customers who may have been affected to contact their banks or credit card providers.

The data breach is BA’s third major IT problem in a little over a year. In May last year a systems outage caused widespread travel disruption over a holiday weekend, with tens of thousands of people affected. A power supply problem at the carrier’s London data centres was blamed for the outage.

In July of this year, another outage caused delays and cancellations, with BA’s Heathrow Terminal 5 particularly badly affected.