Outage affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week
\n london
\nBritish air traffic control operator NATS said on Friday an outage which affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was caused by a software defect.
\nThe incident led to 2,000 flight cancellations and days of disruption, costing airlines millions of pounds as they scrambled to get crews and aircraft back in place and refund passengers.
\nNATS CEO Martin Rolfe said the shutdown was not related to a problem in 2023 which also caused widespread disruption, nor was it linked to military intervention \u2014 as reported by some media outlets last week. He added that safety was at no point compromised during the incident.
\n\u201cThis was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, that we have traced to a small subsection of coding,\u201d he said. \u201cThe issue has been identified and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety tested and deployed.\u201d
\nTransport minister Heidi Alexander, who had last week demanded NATS produce a report on the matter and also ordered an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority, said the disruption was \u201ccompletely unacceptable\u201d.
\n\u201cWe need to urgently understand why this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused chaos,\u201d she said in a statement. \u201cIt is crucial that our national infrastructure is fit for the future.\u201d
\nThe incident followed a shutdown in August 2023 which caused travel chaos, costing airlines \u00a3100 million ($136 million). A smaller technical issue which NATS was behind in July 2025 also caused 150 cancellations.
\nRyanair, Europe\u2019s biggest airline, has repeatedly called for Rolfe to resign since the 2023 failure.
\nThe NATS report on the latest incident was triggered by a request for an identification code from an aircraft being followed by a request for a higher-priority activity, pausing the first request.
\n\u201cHad the higher-priority request arrived even one millisecond earlier or later, the update would have completed normally,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Outage affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week london British air traffic control operator NATS said on Friday an outage which affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was caused by a software defect. The incident led to 2,000 flight cancellations and days of disruption, costing airlines millions of pounds as they scrambled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n