UK hit by new air traffic outage, cancelling flights

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Travellers check on a departure board displaying cancelled flights to Middle East countries amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, at Heathrow Airport Terminal 4, in Greater London, Britain on March 2, 2026. — Reuters/File
Travellers check on a departure board displaying cancelled flights to Middle East countries amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, at Heathrow Airport Terminal 4, in Greater London, Britain on March 2, 2026. — Reuters/File

LONDON: UK flights faced fresh disruption on Monday, with some cancelled due to a technical issue at the nation’s air traffic control agency — the second such outage in two weeks.

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 Sept 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.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2026

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