UK Government Gives NATS One Week to Explain Outage That Cancelled 2,000 Flights

The UK government has given National Air Traffic Services one week to investigate a system failure that caused at least 2,000 flight cancellations at UK airports. NATS has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause. The fault, which affected the flight data processing system, occurred on Tuesday; although it was fixed by Wednesday, delays, cancellations and disruption continued, with airlines reporting millions of pounds in losses.

Transport Minister Heidi Alexander summoned NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to explain the failure, telling parliament she did "not believe this issue was unavoidable." She asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review to establish the cause and ensure air traffic control systems can operate reliably. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary called for Rolfe to step down, describing the outage as "an absolute re-run" of the 2023 incident. Ryanair said its losses totalled at least £3 million ($5.6 million) after cancelling 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers. British Airways said it had cancelled nearly 200 flights since the outage.

A NATS spokesperson said the current failure was not the same issue as three years ago and that the company would "conduct a full investigation to establish the root cause and identify any further action required." Rolfe told the BBC the company had "at this point ruled out cyber" activity as a cause.

The outage is the second major NATS failure in three years. The previous shutdown in August 2023 lasted three hours after a flight plan containing a rare data conflict between two identically named waypoint markers caused systems to enter fail-safe mode, costing airlines £100 million ($188 million). A radar-related technical issue also affected major airports, including Heathrow, in July of last year. Ryanair is suing NATS at London's High Court, seeking more than £7 million ($13 million) over the 2023 outage, and has called on NATS to reinvest its profits into performance improvements and staffing. NATS paid its owners dividends of £175 million ($328.5 million) in 2025.

NATS is a public-private partnership partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds, and the government. That structure puts the same carriers absorbing cancellation losses in a position to also hold a stake in the entity responsible for the outage, which sharpens the dispute over dividends versus reinvestment in system resilience. Ryanair's call for NATS to redirect profits toward performance improvements and additional staffing sits directly against the £175 million dividend paid to owners in 2025.

A single national air traffic data provider concentrates risk across an entire country's airline schedules: when its systems fail, the damage does not stay contained to one carrier or airport but spreads across every operator dependent on that airspace, as it did with Ryanair's 260 cancelled flights and British Airways' nearly 200. This is the second such failure in three years, following the 2023 waypoint-conflict incident that cost airlines £100 million, and a separate radar issue that hit Heathrow last year.

Air navigation service providers like NATS typically operate as regulated monopolies or near-monopolies, which is why government ministers, rather than market competition, become the mechanism for accountability when performance falls short — hence Alexander's summons of Rolfe and her request for an independent Civil Aviation Authority review. The dividend structure adds a second layer of scrutiny: airline part-owners of NATS are simultaneously customers absorbing the cancellation costs and shareholders receiving payouts, a tension Ryanair's litigation and public criticism of Rolfe now puts squarely in view.

What happens next depends on the outcome of the one-week investigation NATS was given, the findings of the Civil Aviation Authority's independent review, and the progress of Ryanair's High Court case seeking over £7 million from the 2023 outage. Whether Rolfe remains in his role, and whether NATS shifts dividend policy toward system investment, will likely hinge on what those inquiries establish about the root cause.