LONDON — Operations at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester were largely back to normal on Thursday after a National Air Traffic Services systems failure cancelled about 2,000 UK flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded earlier in the week, Reuters and British outlets reported.
The hours-long Tuesday outage hit NATS’ flight-processing system — the second major failure in three years. Cirium counted roughly 2,000 affected arrivals and departures across Tuesday and Wednesday. British Airways cancelled hundreds of flights; Ryanair estimated early losses around £3 million after cancelling 260 flights.
Transport minister Heidi Alexander summoned NATS CEO Martin Rolfe, told Parliament she did not believe the disruption was unavoidable, and said she did not think it was a cyberattack. The government gave NATS a week to report back and ordered a separate Civil Aviation Authority review due in six months.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary called the episode “an absolute rerun” of 2023 and again urged Rolfe to resign. NATS said the root cause differed from the 2023 rogue flight-plan failure and pledged a full investigation.
The CAA said passengers are unlikely to receive EU261-style cash compensation because the outage likely qualifies as “extraordinary circumstances,” though airlines must still rebook or refund and provide care. Airlines UK warned the episode again left carriers absorbing costs for failures outside their control.
For travelers, the practical update is simpler: check with airlines before heading to the airport, but the immediate wave of cancellations has eased as aircraft and crews are repositioned.
Sources: Reuters; The Independent; BBC
