Mallorca weathers the storm caused by the Microsoft outage

There were very long queues for check-in, with waits of up to two hours on a day when 1,554 flights (inbound and outbound) had been scheduled for the Balearic airports, 997 of these at Palma.

It was necessary to adopt manual operations, and these lasted for several hours. The Aena airports authority said that, unlike airports elsewhere in Europe and across the world that had to cease all activity, Spain's airports were operational "at all times".

Hotels were also affected and they too had to fall back on manual procedures. The Mallorca Hoteliers Federation and the Association of Hotel Chains both said that there hadn't been any major issues despite the disruption caused by having not been able to use IT systems.

Hotels and tour operators had been concerned about having to cope with travellers unable to fly, but no significant issues arose; cases of this type were merely anecdotal, said the hoteliers.

The president of the travel agencies association in the Balearics, Pedro Fiol, pointed out that most of the airlines with which his members work had solved their internal problems by the early afternoon. Up to 1pm, "we had to sit on our hands because we could do nothing; we were at the mercy of the system being restored".

As to what happens on Saturday, there are bound to be some lingering problems, though these may have more to do with airports elsewhere in Europe rather than Palma.