Root cause for technical glitch grounding thousands of UK flights still unknown by NATS

Cyber attack ruled out but NATS boss says it will be something 'never seen in 50 years of operation'

A technical issue which has affected National Air Traffic Control (NATS) in the UK is still ongoing this morning after a day of disruption yesterday.

The chaos that grounded flights both in UK airports and those in other countries looking to take off for British soil is now in its second day with more delays expected.

Issues started around 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon (Tuesday 8 September) with NATS issuing a public statement confirming a technical issue at 1:45pm.

A flight processing system issue was identified with engineers reported on site at 3:30pm by NATS, working on a fix.

Problems went on long into the night with hundreds of flights delayed and cancelled and thousands of passengers caught up in the system glitch, though.

The UK's air control provider gave a status update last night at 10:10pm which read: "Work is continuing to assist airlines and airports recover from today’s disruption. 

"This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover."

Although the source of the disruption has been identified as a problem in the processing system, how this can happen is yet to be determined by the provider.

It has at least ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of the flight disruptions. 

Martin Rolfe, the boss of National Air Traffic Services - which is half owned by the UK government - spoke on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and said: "In terms of the recovery, I absolutely understand the frustration. There is nothing we hate more than delaying people, and not allowing them to get to their destination. 

"It disrupts airports and disrupts airlines. And we absolutely take accountability and responsibility for that. That is our job. But our job is also to make sure that people stay safe. We never do this lightly.

"We have at this point ruled out cyber. We don’t believe it was a cyber attack.

"Obviously my focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now. But there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption. And we’ll be working on that through the course of today.

"And then obviously our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened, this particular incident. What I will say is I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once. So this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.

This being the latest incident in the last three years has prompted fresh outrage for not only an investigation into how this happened but also into NATS competency to manage our nation's airspace here in the UK. 

He said: "We will be doing a very, very thorough and full investigation."

This being the third major outage in the past three years. August Bank Holiday 2023 was the first with the flight planning system affected, and last year in July it announced a technical failure at its Swanwick air traffic control centre.

There was also a worldwide IT outage in 2024, unrelated to NATS, which affected not only UK airlines and airports but all around the world as well as banks and railways too.