LONDON: UK flights faced fresh disruption on Monday after a technical issue at the country’s air traffic control service caused cancellations and delays, the second outage to hit the system in two weeks.
The issue at the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) centre in Prestwick, Scotland, has been fixed, but disruption continued as airlines and airports worked to restore normal operations.
NATS said engineers had been called to deal with the problem at the Prestwick Centre in South Ayrshire, which handles air traffic control across Scotland and northern England.
“The issue in our Prestwick centre is now fixed,” a NATS spokesperson said.
“We are working with airports and airlines to safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can to minimise any further disruption.”
NATS apologised to passengers and advised them to check their flight status with their airline.
The service said the latest problem was unrelated to a software defect that caused widespread disruption earlier this month.
Flights cancellations and delays
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said 72 of more than 6,000 flights to or from the UK had been cancelled in its latest update.
“If this were the end of the day… this level of cancellations is close to normal — around one percent,” Cirium said.
“However, as it’s early in the day, we anticipate that operational performance will degrade quickly.”
Cirium said Glasgow and Belfast had recorded high cancellation levels, while London-area airports had not been particularly affected.
Airports across Scotland and elsewhere in Britain reported delays.
Passengers reported disruption at Glasgow, Prestwick and Edinburgh airports, while delays were also reported at Manchester, Newcastle and Belfast.
Manchester Airports Group said some flights at Manchester Airport had been delayed by up to an hour. Delays were also reported at East Midlands Airport.
Several flights at Belfast City Airport were cancelled, including services to and from Manchester, Amsterdam and London City.
Dundee and Benbecula airports also confirmed that flights had been affected.
Edinburgh Airport said it was experiencing delays because of the NATS issue at Prestwick.
Second outage in two weeks
The latest disruption comes less than two weeks after a separate NATS outage on September 8 and 9.
A software glitch during that incident led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations across the UK and numerous delays, affecting more than 330,000 passengers.
NATS said the latest incident was not connected to that earlier software problem.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander described the new incident on social media as an “IT issue” and said it would be “deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue”.
Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government would engage with NATS to ensure the problems were addressed and that the necessary resilience was available for the systems.
The latest failure has also renewed criticism of NATS from airlines.
Irish carrier Ryanair again called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign. Rolfe received backing from Downing Street after the earlier disruption.
Ryanair said more than 140 of its flights had been delayed, affecting more than 25,000 passengers.
Airlines demand answers
Wizz Air UK managing director Yvonne Moynihan also questioned NATS’ leadership and governance following the latest disruption.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One, Moynihan asked “what’s next?” and described the situation as a “national confidence crisis” at NATS.
“If this is just a millisecond glitch, why did it take down an entire traffic system?” she said.
The latest outage follows another technical glitch in July 2025 that resulted in scores of flights to and from the UK being cancelled.
Britain also suffered its worst air traffic systems failure in years in 2023, when hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled and more than 700,000 passengers were affected.
NATS has operated under a public-private partnership model since 2001.
