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For several weeks now, Heathrow Rewards, the loyalty scheme of Heathrow Airport, has been “temporarily unavailable”. Understandably, this has led to a fair bit of speculation, with some even concluding that it may have even shut down.

However, an update was provided today. It seems that the Heathrow Rewards scheme (or my account, at least) was the victim of a successful hack. Here’s the email I received today:

What’s slightly odd is that while the emails seem to suggest that I am one of a limited class of users who was affected by this, they deemed it necessary to suspend the entire site. My reading of that is that this hack was probably quite widespread – affecting so many accounts that rather than try to isolate and deal with the individual cases, they needed to suspend the whole site.

Here’s the specific Heathrow Rewards wording on this:

In order to secure your Heathrow Rewards account, we have temporarily frozen your account and reset your password. We will be in touch when the Heathrow Rewards website is live again with guidance on accessing and securing your account with a new password.

I suppose with Covid rampant, they also realised that just shutting the whole thing down to deal with it was only going to cause a limited amount of hassle to people, anyway.

So the good news is that Heathrow Rewards does appear to be sticking around. The bad news is that when you do log back in, you may have had all your points nabbed.