Dozens of flights in the UK faced fresh disruption on Monday after a technical issue at the country’s air traffic control agency forced some cancellations, marking the second such outage in two weeks.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said 72 of more than 6,000 flights to or from the UK had been cancelled on Monday.
“If this were the end of the day, this level of cancellations is close to normal — around one percent,” Cirium said, adding that it expected operational performance to deteriorate as the day progressed.
The National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said the issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland had been fixed and apologised for the disruption.
“We are working with airports and airlines to minimise any further disruption,” NATS said in a statement.
Glasgow and Belfast experienced high cancellation rates, while London-area airports were not significantly affected, according to Cirium.
A NATS spokesperson said the latest issue was unrelated to the outage two weeks ago.
The latest incident follows an outage on September 8 and 9, when a software glitch caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations and numerous delays, affecting more than 330,000 passengers.
Airlines call for action
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander said the new incident, which she described on X as an “IT issue”, would be “deeply frustrating” for passengers following the earlier outage.
Irish airline Ryanair again called for NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe to resign. The airline said more than 140 of its flights had been delayed, affecting more than 25,000 passengers.
The disruption earlier this month followed a technical glitch in July 2025 that led to scores of flights to and from the UK being cancelled.
In 2023, Britain experienced its worst air traffic systems failure in years, affecting more than 700,000 passengers after hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled.
NATS has operated under a public-private partnership model since 2001. The British government holds a 49 percent stake and a “golden share” that allows it to intervene in strategic decisions, while the remainder is held mainly by a consortium of airlines.
