Air travel across the United Kingdom has been disrupted after a technical failure in the country’s air traffic control system forced the cancellation of thousands of flights.
National Air Traffic Services, or NATS, which provides air traffic control services at 15 UK airports, said the technical issue began around 1 p.m. Tuesday. The outage affected major airports including London Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, as well as Manchester and Birmingham. More than 1,750 flights arriving at and departing from UK airports were cancelled on Tuesday, according to aviation analytics company Cirium. A further 291 flights were cancelled on Wednesday.
Airlines UK says more than 330-thousand passengers have been affected by the disruption. NATS said its flight processing system was fixed after several hours, but warned that the aviation network would take time to recover from the disruption. Heathrow said flights were operating on Wednesday, but warned passengers that delays could continue as airlines worked to reposition aircraft and crew. British Airways cancelled more than 190 flights, while Ryanair said more than 65-thousand of its passengers were affected and more than 50 flights were cancelled.
The disruption also had a knock-on effect on flights across Europe, with some incoming flights held at airports outside the UK.
UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander met with NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe on Wednesday and raised concerns about the scale of the disruption. NATS has apologized to passengers and says a full investigation will be carried out to determine what went wrong and whether further action is needed.
The latest incident is the third major air traffic control disruption in the UK in just over three years, following major outages in 2023 and 2025.
