LONDON — A sudden technical glitch in the United Kingdom’s national air traffic control system triggered widespread travel chaos on Tuesday, forcing the cancellation of nearly 300 flights across the country, according to data from leading flight monitoring platform Flightradar24.
Early Tuesday afternoon, Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) first confirmed the issue, noting that the technical fault was primarily impacting outbound flights, and that engineering teams had been deployed to address the problem on an urgent basis. By later in the day, the regulator released an update confirming that a technical solution had been rolled out, and flight operations had begun to gradually return to normal. NATS also issued a formal apology to passengers and airlines for the widespread travel disruptions.
In a post shared on the social platform X, Flightradar24 detailed that the outage impacted dozens of flights operated by a range of major carriers across Europe, including the UK’s own British Airways and EasyJet, as well as Dutch flag carrier KLM and Germany’s Lufthansa.
Major aviation hubs across the UK reported disruptions tied to the system failure, including London’s three busiest airports: Heathrow, Stansted, and London City. Airports in Manchester, Birmingham, multiple regions across Scotland, and other sites around the country also confirmed scheduling interruptions, and issued official warnings advising all travelers to confirm their flight’s status directly with their operating airline before heading to the airport.
EasyJet, a prominent budget airline operating extensively across the UK and Europe, confirmed that a portion of its scheduled services could not operate as planned due to the failure, adding that the knock-on effects of the outage caused delays to flight routes across the entire European continent.
Heathrow Airport’s official online schedule showed that most of the canceled and delayed services on Tuesday were short-haul outbound flights bound for destinations across Europe. Notably, inbound flights to the UK did not appear to experience significant impacts from the technical issue. As of Tuesday, authorities had not yet released an initial assessment of what underlying cause triggered the technical failure.