UK airports continued to suffer knock-on disruption on Wednesday after a NATS flight-processing system failure hit departures across the network the previous day, triggering widespread cancellations and delays at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted. More than 1,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, with further cancellations still appearing the following morning as airlines worked to restore aircraft and crew rotations.
NATS restored the affected system, but recovery took longer than expected as traffic flowed back into normal schedules. Heathrow accounted for most of the remaining cancellations on Wednesday, while British Airways, Ryanair and other carriers dealt with rolling disruption across domestic and international services.
NATS ruled out a cyber attack and planned a full investigation into the outage. Airports warned passengers to check flight status before travelling as the backlog continued to ripple through the UK aviation network.