BA website falls over under heavy load

British Airways' website is suffering intermittent periods of downtime as people try to access the site for information on flights affected by freezing UK weather conditions.

On Monday the website began to suffer from periods of downtime due to high demand. As of 11am Monday the site had been undergoing problems for around two hours, a BA spokesman told ZDNet UK.

Snow and ice have caused rolling cancellations at UK airports, and the BA website has experienced "absolutely massive demand from around the world", the BA spokesman said. The British Airways customer website either loaded very slowly, or not at all, on Monday morning.

The high volume of traffic to the website is "linked to how many cancellations are being made and all the simultaneous hits from customers trying to rebook [flights]", the spokesman said. "With Heathrow running extremely limited operations people are extremely desperate for information."

The web service downforeveryoneorjustme shows that the BA website is intermittently falling offline.

BA is "putting extra resources in" to keep the website online and is trying to "make [the website] as robust as possible", the spokesman said, but could not give details on the nature of the resources being used. BA said it is trying to increase the site's capacity so that it can hold more simultaneous users without falling over.