Aer Lingus has blamed a technical hitch for the cancellation of almost all its flights to the UK and the rest of Europe from Dublin on Saturday.

All flights to Dublin were also cancelled, except those from Spain and Portugal.

The airline said 51 flights were affected, from around 2pm on Saturday.

Aer Lingus said the disruption was caused by a ‘major break’ in connectivity from the UK network provider of its cloud-based check-in and boarding processes.

It resulted in long queues from around 9am on Saturday morning at Dublin Airport and elsewhere, including London Heathrow.

In a statement, the airline said: “Aer Lingus seriously apologises to customers for the severe disruption caused today by the unavailability of key systems for check-in, boarding and our website.

“The system outage was caused by a break in connectivity in services from a UK network provider.

“The break in connectivity has now been restored and we are taking steps to bring all of our systems back online.”

Staff resorted to checking in passengers manually on Saturday, and it was able to operate its transatlantic flights from Dublin but with some delays and reduced passenger numbers.