One passenger wrote: “@easyJet what an absolute joke at Manchester this morning. Need to sort your bag drop out and open the desks on time, now everyone rushing for flights!”
Another person said: “How about you adequately staff your check-in and bag drop? It is a shambles at T1 and not enough staff to support customers @manairport.”
A third commented: “@manairport What is happening at T1. Huge queue that can only indicate a massive issue.”
The Manchester Evening News reported that while the number of flights taking off from Manchester Airport this morning is to be expected, the number of passengers was higher than expected.
The influx of passengers was so high that the queue for the Easyjet check-in desk extended beyond the entrance to Terminal 1 whilst staff managed the situation.
According to reports, the situation was managed by the airport’s resilience and customer services teams and the queue was back to normal by around 6.45am.
In a statement, EasyJet said: “Due to a baggage belt failure at Manchester Airport this morning, some Easyjet customers as well as those of other airlines, experienced longer than usual queues at bag drop.
“Easyjet takes the wellbeing of our passengers very seriously and we worked closely with the airport team and the issue has now been resolved.
“Whilst this was outside of our control we would like to thank passengers for their understanding and apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
The disruption to passenger’s journeys comes just days after the UK’s air traffic control systems suffered a massive failure on bank holiday Monday.
While the fault was fixed within four hours, it caused more than 2,000 flights to be cancelled.
Speaking to the BBC, the chief executive of NATS (British National Air Traffic Services), Martin Rolfe explained what happened.
He said: “Simply speaking, our systems received some data on an aircraft and it was unable to process it.
“That is incredibly rare – we process millions of flight plans every year, thousands every day.”
He added: “It is safer for us [in that situation] to revert to a manual system, that makes sure no data that is safety critical to people’s travel can ever fall into the hands of a controller, and they can continue to operate at a lower capacity.
“Very occasionally… we end up with a situation which is not possible to fix immediately.
“While I agree it is not the service we want to provide, the priority is safety.”