Britain — Due to a technical problem, flights into and out of the country on a popular national holiday could have been delayed or canceled on Monday, according to the British air traffic control system.
Just after 12:30 p.m. local time (7:30 a.m. ET), a representative from Britain’s National Air Traffic Service informed NBC News: “We are now experiencing a technical issue that has applied flow of traffic restrictions to maintain safety.”
It stated that engineers were trying to identify and correct the problem, but it was unclear how long it would take to do so.
Air traffic control staff are currently entering flight plans manually, according to a spokeswoman.
They explained that “this morning’s technical issue is affecting our capacity to automatically process flight plans.” Traffic flow limits have been put in place while our engineers work to fix the manual input of flight plans, which prevents us from processing as many of them at once.
They stated, “Our technical experts have been looking at all potential solutions to correct this as soon as possible.”
The largest international hub in London, Heathrow Airport, reported that “there is disruption to flights across the UK as a result of national airspace issues.”
The problem, according to the London airports Stansted and Gatwick as well as Manchester Airport in the north of England, affected flights.
A “flight data processing system failure” in the U.K. has led to “very high” delays, according to the European air traffic body Eurocontrol.
An early-Monday “network-wide malfunction in the UK air traffic control computer systems” had happened, the Scottish airline Loganair said in a message on X, the social media website that replaced Twitter.
The airline expressed optimism that it would be able to run the majority of domestic flights inside Scotland with little to no disruption but warned that the problem would cause delays for north-south and international flights.
Given that Monday is a national holiday in the UK, this tragedy occurs on a day when many people are traveling.
Several people said they were stranded on airplanes on the tarmac on social media. NBC News was unable to independently confirm their claims right away.
The pilot reportedly told passengers they would be delayed owing to a significant computer breakdown, according to a passenger who spoke to Reuters while aboard a plane that was being detained at the airport in Budapest.