LONDON 

A major IT outage hit British Airways on Monday as the UK's flag-carrier reportedly lost all communications with aircraft around Europe, requiring the grounding of some flights.

The airline's website is also down, with all communications lost with flights, according to multiple media reports.

The reported glitch left pilots unable to file flight plans electronically, having to manually call into the carrier's operations center at Heathrow Airport, reported Mirror, a British daily.

Down Detector, a website malfunction tracker, recorded an enormous spike in issues with the British Airways website and app on Monday evening, starting at 5 p.m. GMT.