UK hit by new air traffic outage, cancelling flights

The National Air Traffic Services (NATS), plagued by several incidents in recent years, apologised for the latest incident at a centre in Scotland that has since been fixed.

"We are working with airports and airlines to... minimise any further disruption," NATS said in a statement.

It followed an outage on September 8 and 9, when a software glitch caused more than 2,000 UK flight cancellations and numerous delays, affecting more than 330,000 passengers.

"The issue at our Prestwick centre in Scotland... is unrelated to the issue two weeks ago," said a NATS spokesperson.

In its latest update, aviation analytics firm Cirium said about 200 out of more than 6,000 flights to or from the UK had been cancelled.

"If this were the end of the day... this level of cancellations is close to normal -- around one percent," it noted in a statement.

"However, as it's early in the day, we anticipate that operational performance will degrade quickly."

It added that while Glasgow and Belfast had experienced "high cancellations" with about 10 percent of their flights cancelled, London's airports had been spared.

Transport minister Heidi Alexander acknowledged that the new incident, which she referred to on X as an "IT issue", "will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue".

- Airlines react -

Irish airline Ryanair once more called for the resignation of NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe -- who received Downing Street's backing following the incident earlier this month.

Europe's biggest carrier by passenger numbers said more than 140 Ryanair flights had been delayed, leaving over 25,000 passengers facing delays.

EasyJet, the most affected airline from the latest incident with 47 cancelled flights according to Cirium, said Monday's outage again "calls into question the resilience of NATS' systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures".

The travel chaos earlier this month followed a technical glitch in July 2025 that saw scores of flights to and from the UK cancelled, prompting anger from airline chiefs.

Britain suffered its worst air systems failure in years in 2023, with more than 700,000 passengers affected after hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled.

NATS has operated under a public-private partnership model since 2001. The government holds a 49-percent stake, as well as a "golden share" enabling it to intervene in strategic decisions.

The remainder is held primarily by a consortium of airlines.