Just an update:

We arrived at LHR a few minutes late, attributable more to a late departure from MSY than the Microsoft outage. But I had read about the outage and the resultant flight disruptions. So while we were taxiing to our gate, I looked up my AMS connection and saw that, although the prior four LHR-AMS had been canceled, mine is scheduled to operate with only a slight (~30 minutes) delay.

At that point I had to try to guess whether to vary from my standard practice of using the First Wing and going to Flight Connections instead. I knew the disruption would be causing chaos, but I didn’t know where it would be worse.

We had arrived at the B gates and I saw that there was no queue at all — none — for the B gates Flight Connections, so I thought I’d clear there. A gate had not yet been assigned to my flight, so I got turned away. I didn’t realize that that made me ineligible to use the B gates Flight Connection; why is that?

So I hopped on the transit to the A gates, figuring that when I got there I could make a last-minute decision to use the e-gates or Flight Connections. And when I got off the lift (having learned long ago that the lift is almost always faster than the escalators), I saw that the e-gates appeared to be working without any queue. So I breezed through and headed back up to departures, only to discover that that is where the chaos was. Long lines everywhere, including the longest line I had ever seen at the First Wing. But being a New Yorker (when need be!), rather than get in the queue, I walked right to the front, where I was able to show the BA agent my boarding pass and ask whether I needed to get in the queue. Seeing that I was on an AMS flight that still is operating, she directed me right in and to security, where again there was no queue. I was in Galleries First in no time.