200 UK flights cancelled in air outage, Cirium says

About 200 flights to or from the UK had been cancelled on Monday after a technical issue at the National Air Traffic Services centre in Prestwick, Scotland, aviation analytics firm Cirium said.

NATS apologised and said the issue had been fixed. It said it was working with airports and airlines to minimise further disruption, and a spokesperson said the problem was unrelated to a NATS outage earlier in September.

Cirium said the cancellations amounted to about 200 out of more than 6,000 UK flights. It said that level would be close to normal if it were the end of the day, but warned that performance could worsen because it was still early.

Cirium said Glasgow and Belfast had experienced high cancellations, with about 10 percent of their flights cancelled, while London airports had been spared.

Transport minister Heidi Alexander called the incident an IT issue and said it would be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous outage.

Ryanair again called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign. The airline said more than 140 Ryanair flights had been delayed, leaving more than 25,000 passengers facing delays.

EasyJet, which Cirium said had 47 cancelled flights, said the outage called into question the resilience of NATS systems and showed the need for action to prevent repeated failures.

The disruption followed a NATS outage on September 8 and 9, when a software glitch caused more than 2,000 UK flight cancellations and delays affecting more than 330,000 passengers. The UK also had air traffic disruption after a technical glitch in July 2025 and a major air systems failure in 2023.