Flights delayed and cancelled at Edinburgh Airport after IT issue affected air traffic control
All flights were suspended at Edinburgh Airport this morning due to an IT issue with air traffic control.
The airport has announced the resumption of all flights from central Scotland but many passengers may still face delays and cancellations on Friday.
One flight from Manchester was diverted, around 12 flights were canceled and 20 flights faced delays, some of more than two hours, according to the airport’s live departure and arrival boards.
Flights to London Gatwick, Bristol, Amsterdam and Frankfurt have been cancelled. Other flights, including flights to London and Dublin, were postponed.
Some passengers reported being stranded on planes on the runway Friday morning.
Passengers said they were “disheartened and stressed” when they heard their flights had been cancelled.
Morven McCall and Cody Stevenson, both 19, told Sky News they were traveling to Amsterdam on their first holiday together. However, when they arrived at the airport, an announcement was made that their flight was cancelled.
“I’ve been sick over the summer and have had to cancel two holidays already. This was our first time on the road together,” Morven said.
Another passenger told the broadcaster he was told halfway through boarding that the airport was closed due to air traffic control.
The airport explained on social media platform X that the outage was a local issue and advised customers to contact their airline for information about their flights.
A spokesperson for Edinburgh Airport said: “Flights have resumed at Edinburgh Airport following an IT issue with our air traffic control provider ANS. We thank passengers for their patience and understanding.”
This follows an earlier announcement that all flights have been suspended: “No flights are currently operating from Edinburgh Airport.
“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve it as soon as possible. We will provide updates when available. Please contact your airline for the latest information regarding your flight.”
It appears that the problem is not related to the previous Cloudflare outage. Visitors to some pages encountered a “500 web server error” warning instead of the content they expected on sites such as X, Substack, Canva and Down Detector.
The airport is the sixth busiest airport in the United Kingdom and the busiest in Scotland. It was used by 15.8 million passengers last year.
Nats, which manages most of the UK airspace, said it would “work closely with affected airlines and provide the best support we can” during the disruption.
A spokesman for Air Navigation Solutions (ANSL) said: “This morning a technical issue affected one of our systems at Edinburgh Airport, impacting flight operations.
“Our technical capacity has now been restored and flights have resumed.
“Security is our number one priority and our engineers worked quickly to restore system capacity as quickly as possible.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused and thank everyone for their patience.”
It is not yet known exactly how many passengers were affected by the incident.
