LONDON, United Kingdom: Problematic flight data from a military aircraft triggered a UK air traffic outage that disrupted thousands of flights, the Financial Times reported, citing four people briefed on the incident.
The flight plan allegedly caused a wider failure in systems operated by National Air Traffic Services, or NATS. The network took several hours and multiple restart attempts to recover.
Airlines cancelled more than 2,000 flights on Tuesday after the NATS system shut down for about four hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers.
NATS initially described the incident as a technical failure. Chief executive Martin Rolfe later apologised to passengers and ruled out a cyberattack.
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UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander summoned Rolfe for talks and asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review. NATS will also submit its own report on the cause of the failure.
The Ministry of Defence said there was no indication that military personnel had made an error and noted that the incident remained under investigation. “We do not believe there’s any indication of an error on the part of the military,” an MoD spokesperson said.
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The outage was the most serious disruption to British commercial airspace since August 2023, when another technical problem delayed almost 1,600 flights.
