The IAG group member Aer Lingus had to cancel all intra-European flights to/from Dublin on Saturday from 14 p.m. local time. The "airlift" to the United Kingdom was also affected. The background is IT problems.

The company expects the impact to extend into the evening as well, with some incoming flights being canceled. It is currently unclear how many connections and passengers are affected. The carrier does not provide any further information. It is currently emphasized that Aer Lingus does not expect that there will be any cancellations on Sunday.

The IT problems also have a clumsy effect on communication with the passengers, because according to their own statements, the travelers could not be informed about the failures in advance by SMS, e-mail or app. Those affected criticize that they learned from social media and word-of-mouth that the flights were canceled, but that the bad news was only announced at Dublin Airport hours later.

"Due to a major disruption at a network provider, our cloud-based systems that enable check-in, boarding and our website are currently unavailable," Aer Lingus said in an official statement. “All flights originally scheduled to depart Dublin Airport from 14.00pm to European and UK destinations have had to be canceled today. As we are currently unable to communicate directly with our customers, we are asking our customers who are booked on these flights not to come to Dublin Airport. We sincerely apologize to all customers affected by today's disruptions and cancellations."

The affected passengers want to be rebooked as quickly as possible and brought to their destination. However, it is currently the case that those affected cannot do this themselves via the homepage or the app. Therefore, they are dependent on the hotline and counters at the airports. But even these cannot always help because of the IT problems.

Aer Lingus took a few hours to make the decision, as check-in agents were already unable to check in as usual at 9:00 a.m. local time. The options via app and homepage were also not accessible. Long queues formed because the boarding passes were initially filled out manually with a ballpoint pen.

Airport operator DAA, which has staggered access to the terminal to cope with the crowds, said it was an internal IT issue at Aer Lingus and that no other airline had been affected by these technical difficulties. However, in Dublin Airport Terminal 2, there are very long queues outside Aer Lingus counters.