UK Government Demands Investigation into NATS System Failure

The UK government has given National Air Traffic Services (NATS) one week to investigate the system failure that caused widespread flight cancellations at UK airports, with the company ruling out a cyber attack.

At least 2,000 flights were cancelled due to a fault in the flight data processing system operated by NATS on Tuesday, according to aviation analytics company Ciriumwith.

While the fault was fixed by Wednesdays, delays, cancellations and major disruption at UK airports continued with airlines reporting millions of pounds worth of financial loss.

The outage was the second major NATS failure in three years, prompting Britain's Transport minister Heidi Alexander to summon NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to explain what went wrong.

The chief executive officer of budget airline Ryanair Michael O'Leary has called for Mr Rolfe to step down from the role, saying the outage was "an absolute re-run" of what happened in 2023.

Ryanair said its losses from Tuesday's outage were at least 3 million British pounds ($5.6 million), after the airline cancelled 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers.

British Airways said it had had cancelled nearly 200 flights since the outage.

But a spokesperson for NATS said it was not the same issue as three years ago, and instead affected the flight data system.

"We will conduct a full investigation to establish the root cause and identify any further action required," the spokesperson said.

Mr Rolfe said his company had "at this point ruled out cyber" activity as a cause.

"We don't believe it was a cyberattack," he told the BBC.

"We never do this lightly. We only ever do it when there is an issue that cannot be resolved quickly, and we have to take action to make (sure) those who are flying, who are in the air at that time, are safe."

NATS is a public-private partnership which is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government.

The last NATS shutdown in August 2023 caused travel chaos, costing airlines 100 million British pounds ($188 million).

That fault was caused when a flight plan containing a rare data conflict of two identically named waypoint markers caused systems to enter fail-safe mode. The shutdown lasted three hours until an engineer made it into work.

There was also a radar-related technical issue in July last year, which affected major airports including one of the world's biggest, Heathrow.

Ryanair is suing NATS at London's High Court, seeking more than 7 million British pounds ($13 million) over the 2023 outage.

It has called on NATS to reinvest its profits into performance improvements and hiring more staff.

The air traffic control provider paid its owners dividends of 175 million British Pounds ($328.5 million) in 2025.