UK air traffic control outage caused by software defect, says operator

​British air traffic ‌control operator NATS ​said on Friday an outage which affected hundreds of thousands of ‌passengers last week was cause by a software defect.

NATS CEO Martin Rolfe said the shutdown was not related to ‌a problem in 2023 which also caused widespread disruption, ‌nor was it linked to military intervention - as reported by some media outlets last week. He added that safety was at no ⁠point compromised ​during the ⁠incident. "This was a software issue in a specific part of ⁠our flight data system, that we have traced to a ​small subsection of coding," he said. "The issue has been identified ⁠and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety ⁠tested ​and deployed."

Transport minister Heidi Alexander said the disruption was "completely unacceptable", adding that "we need to urgently understand why ⁠this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused ⁠chaos". "It is ⁠crucial that our national infrastructure is fit for the future," she said in a ‌statement.