However, hubs have warned that it would take time for operations to ‌return to normal after the disruption left aircraft in “the wrong places.”

The hours-long disruption has increased the pressure upon the NATS, with airlines ramping up their criticism of Britain’s aviation infrastructures, while the Andy Burnham government, taking a grim view of the situation, has summoned Martin Rolfe, the agency’s chief, to explain the shutdown.

The disruption resulted in the cancellation of 2,000 flights, apart from leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at major airports across the European country.

Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, has called for Rolfe’s removal, while citing his role in the last system meltdown in August 2023, when cancelled flights cost operators 100 million pounds (USD 135 million).

Transport minister Heidi Alexander will reportedly hear directly from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain the fault, amid ​concerns over the resilience of the British aviation sector’s infrastructure and technological resilience.

As operations restarted, Heathrow Airport said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport, as schedules would have changed ‌due ⁠to the problems on Tuesday.

“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition,” the UK’s busiest hub said in a statement.

“We know how frustrating this situation is and … are working closely with our ⁠local NATS team and airline partners to recover normal operations as quickly as possible.”

London Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, remarked while advising passengers to ⁠check with their airline first.

While 150,000 Ryanair passengers got affected by the outage after it cancelled ⁠more than 200 flights, British Airways had to cancel and divert 100 flights, with another tens of thousands impacted.

Two of NATS’ previous operational glitches resulted in shutdowns in August 2023 and in July 2025. On both occasions, major airports, including Britain’s largest, Heathrow, got affected.

“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on X (formerly Twitter).

Michael O’Leary, group CEO of Ryanair, told Reuters the outage was “an absolute rerun” of ​what happened in 2023, when a rogue flight plan caused the shutdown.

“Fire him. He’s been there since 2015. He is useless,” he said of ​Rolfe.

NATS said that the issue, which had impacted its flight data processing system, was resolved. It also dismissed talks about a potential cyber breach affecting its digital architecture.

“It was not the same issue as 2023. This one affected our flight data system at Swanwick. We will conduct a ‌full investigation ⁠to establish the root cause and identify any further action required,” a NATS spokesperson said.

“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped. Our system issue is now resolved; we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights,” the agency further clarified on X.

The traffic control provider later said in another X update that it would take time to recover from the disruption, adding that “this ⁠has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the entire aviation network.”

Rolfe also termed the cause of the disruption a new one. While speaking with the BBC Radio, he apologised for what had gone wrong without giving details of what had happened, apart from saying a cyberattack had been ruled out.

He later told Sky News that NATS had not “fully done the investigation” to find the reason behind the technical issue that caused the disruption.

“We don’t have an idea yet of exactly what went wrong,” the NATS boss remarked.

Airlines attack the NATS boss

Forgetting their fierce rivalry, European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair came together to attack NATS and Rolfe while calling for an “overhaul” of the air traffic control provider.

“A critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill. NATS is simply not fit for purpose in its current form,” Wizz Air remarked.

“Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told that resilience would improve. We were told that the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” Ryanair Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said.

As per Ryanair’s estimates, the losses from Tuesday’s outage were 3 million pounds so far, after it cancelled 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers.

In 2024, Britain’s aviation regulator asked NATS to review its outage-related contingency plans after the automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year earlier, causing chaos across the British airports.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) too jumped into the action on Tuesday by “getting in touch” with NATS over the incident and expects the latter to share a full report.

“We will then consider ⁠whether any further steps need to be taken to help secure the safe reliability of the UK’s air traffic control system,” a CAA spokesperson said.

The outage, as per the data from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24, caused the cancellation of 1,300 flights to and from the United Kingdom.

“Another 177 flights got cancelled for Wednesday, nearly all of them at Heathrow, the country’s largest airport,” it added.

Another data point on the flight-tracking platform FlightAware said some 490 departures were delayed at six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh, and Bristol, as of 1518 GMT Tuesday. Some 525 arrivals at those six airports were either cancelled or delayed.

British Airways on Tuesday cancelled/diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted and said on Wednesday 190 flights had been ​cancelled as disruption continued.

NATS, a public-private partnership that ⁠is partially owned ​by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds, and the British government, paid its ​owners dividends of 175 million pounds in 2025.

Ryanair has decided to sue NATS at London’s High Court and is seeking over 7 million pounds over the 2023 outage.

The carrier, apart from aggressively pitching for the agency’s leadership overhaul, has called on NATS to reinvest its profits ​into performance improvements and hiring more staff.

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