Over 1,000 UK flights cancelled as air traffic control fails again

More than 1,000 flights were cancelled across UK airports on Tuesday following a technical failure at air traffic control provider Nats, marking the third major outage in three years, according to The Telegraph. Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Manchester and Belfast City were among the airports affected, with equipment failure reported at Nats’ Swanwick headquarters.

Nats said the issue was resolved by 7:30pm but warned disruption would continue overnight. Night flight restrictions at major London airports were lifted to help clear the backlog. Ryanair called for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, with the airline’s operations officer describing the failure as “abhorrent.” Previous outages in 2023 and 2025 also caused severe disruption.