Hundreds of flights delayed, cancelled after UK air traffic control glitch

By Al Jazeera Staff, AP and Reuters. Published On 8 Sep 20268 Sep 2026.

Key points

• Data on flight-tracking platform FlightAware indicated concerning 490 departure delays at six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol as of 15: 18 GMT.
• Ryanair remarked more than 65, 000 of its passengers had been affected by delays of up to eight hours and that it had cancelled more than 50 flights.
• Regarding 525 arrivals at those six airports were either cancelled or delayed, the website data indicates.
• Aviation analyst John Strickland remarked the consequences of even a relatively short outage can be severe as delays rapidly cascade through tightly ⁠scheduled airline networks.
• Britain's aviation regulator remarked it would expect NATS to share a full report on Tuesday's system failure.

Hundreds of flights at major United Kingdom airports, including London's Heathrow and Gatwick, have been cancelled and hundreds more delayed since of a technical fault at the National Air Traffic Services (NATS).

In practice, the IT malfunction on Tuesday happened three years after a flight-plan processing failure at NATS caused even more widespread disruption.

In a post on X, NATS apologised to frustrated passengers in departure halls throughout the UK and stated a difficulty with its flight data processing system had been fixed.

"Recovery from today's system matter has taken longer than we had hoped. Our system matter is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as feasible to clear the backlog of flights, " NATS noted on X.

Airlines pressed the resignation of Martin Rolfe, the CEO of NATS, questioned whether the UK's air traffic control system was ⁠fit for purpose and called on the UK administration to intervene.

In a video posted on X, Ryanair's Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon remarked "despite promises, reports and assurances that they would fix the systems, once again NATS, under Martin Rolfe's leadership have failed UK travellers and have failed airlines which are trying to get their passengers to and from the UK".

"A few hours of outage may on the face of it sound limited but the impact ⁠is enormous when a substantial number of airports across the UK are affected, " Strickland remarked.

Notably, the UK Civil Aviation Authority, the country's independent aviation regulator, remarked it would then consider whether any reforms are needed to ‌secure the reliability of the UK's air traffic control system.

In short, hundreds of flights delayed, cancelled after UK air traffic control glitch is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.