A global IT outage has caused disruption at East Midlands Airport on what officials say will be the busiest day of the year so far.
On Friday, around 20,000 passengers were expected at the airport near Castle Donington to set off on their summer holidays.
However, due to widespread international IT problems, aircraft had to remain grounded at many airports around the world.
According to information from the BBC, the airlines TUI and Ryanair had to manually check in their passengers at East Midlands Airport (EMA) on Friday morning because of problems with the computer systems.
EMA spokesman Ioan Reed-Aspley told the BBC that the outage appeared to have affected the IT system of ground handling service Swissport, which is used to check in and board passengers on aircraft.
He said: “Of course, this is normally done digitally, but their IT systems are down, so these processes have to be done manually.”
“Fortunately, most of our departures took place this morning. We still have a few planes on the ground at the moment, but the vast majority of passengers have already left.
“We advise you to check with your airline if possible to make sure everything is OK. There is no reason not to come to the airport at this time.”
He said there could be problems returning on Friday afternoon from flights that had already departed from the EMA.
The outage has caused major disruptions in businesses and government agencies.
Software giant Microsoft has announced it is taking “damage control measures” after the outage began around 00:00 (BST) on Thursday.
The company said it was investigating issues with cloud services in the U.S. and an issue affecting several of its apps and services.
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