Passengers waiting to fly out of London’s Gatwick airport Monday morning were left squinting and craning their necks to read whiteboards crammed with critical flight information. Via its Twitter account, an airport spokesperson apologized to travelers, explaining that “damage to a Vodafone fibre optic cable” took down the airport’s flight info screens, forcing them to respond with “contingencies”—specifically, the whiteboards you’d find in an eighth-grade English class:
Passengers tweeting out their frustrations explained that Gatwick officials literally shouted out departure and arrival times, manually updating flight information on the board while crowded by hundreds of frustrated travelers. Gatwick is Britain’s second-busiest airport, after Heathrow, serving 45 million passengers annually. Quartz reports that August is the busiest month of the year for the airport. As of around 5pm local time, the screens were still down.
[Quartz]