Offline
Menu
UK hit by fresh air traffic outage at Scotland centre, flights cancelled
By Administrator
Published on 09/22/2026 11:00
News

LONDON — UK flights faced fresh disruption 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 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 72 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 per cent,” 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... London-area airports are not particularly impacted”.

 

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”.

 

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.

Comments