Scottish couple stranded in Turkey for days as global IT outage sees flights cancelled

A couple from West Lothian have been left stranded in Turkey after a global IT outage caused thousands of flights to be cancelled.

David Twaddle and Yvonne Donaldson were scheduled to fly from Dalaman to Edinburgh via Manchester on Sunday but their flight was among those affected.

A flawed software update from the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike impacted around 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide last Friday, bringing businesses and infrastructure to a standstill.

Mr Twaddle told STV News: “It’s crazy – we’ve been hanging in limbo since Sunday evening.

“There are still no flights. The only information we’ve received from TUI is to keep all the receipts for food, accommodation, transfers and soft drinks.

“We imagined we were flying out today (Thursday) so we checked out our second accommodation that we booked ourselves. I’ve paid the bill for that. I’ve contacted the manager to start another reservation depending on how long it’s going to take to get back.

“It has been financially distressing and the duress we’ve been under – just waiting every day for an email or a text from a TUI rep. Obviously it’s costing us a fortune to extend our Wi-Fi – it’s not a great situation.

“I am not facing any loss of earnings but I’m having to use extended holiday. Yvonne is losing earnings every day we are here. She was supposed to be back at work on Tuesday. It doesn’t look like she’s going to be back.

“It’s not a holiday at all anymore – it’s more like a sentence.”

The chief executive of Crowdstrike has said he was “deeply sorry” for the incident, but warned it would take “some time” for systems to be fully restored.

Many banks, airlines and media companies remain offline with one IT expert warning that it could even take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored.

Thousands of flights have been cancelled worldwide, while rail and air firms in the UK warn of “widespread IT issues”.

A TUI UK & Ireland spokesperson said: “We would like to apologise to our customers who were impacted by the global IT outage that resulted in some delays and cancellations.

“Whilst the original IT issue was outside of our control the impact, alongside air traffic control restrictions over the weekend, meant we had to cancel some flights and delay some return flights home. We understand how frustrating this would have been and recognise that many of these delays happened when our customers were already at the airport.

“We would like to reassure customers that if they are currently overseas our TUI team will look after them and flights home provided. We will continue to update customers with more information and can confirm that if a return flight time has changed we will contact them directly 24 hours before departure.

“We thank our customers for their understanding and continued patience.”