Technical glitch, not cyberattack, hits hundreds of UK flights

UK air travellers faced more sadness on Wednesday with nearly 400 flights scrapped across the country, as Britain’s air traffic control service scrambled to recover from a technical glitch which it ruled out as a ‘cyberattack’, reports Gulf News.

After 1,746 flights were cancelled Tuesday following the outage, another 399 were axed Wednesday, the majority to and from London Heathrow, one of Europe’s busiest airports, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

More than 330,000 passengers were affected over the two days of disruption, with 155,000 seeing their flights cancelled while around 180,000 experienced delays, industry body Airlines UK said.

"We ended up sitting on our plane for just over five hours," Matt Ernster, 28, who was returning to Boston via Heathrow from his honeymoon in Paris on Tuesday, told AFP.

When they were finally allowed to disembark from the plane, "it turned into a gigantic, chaotic scene", Ernster said.

The baggage collection "felt like an apocalyptic situation", and there were no hotels available in a two-hour radius.
"It was the worst travel experience I've ever had."

The head of the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), Martin Rolfe, said "we have at this point ruled out cyber" activity as a cause.

"We don't believe it was a cyberattack," he told BBC radio.

Rolfe said NATS will be doing a "very, very thorough" investigation into what exactly caused the incident.

National carrier British Airways said it had to cancel nearly 550 flights, 200 of them Wednesday due to the incident, which it said affected 85,000 of its customers.

This week’s travel chaos followed a technical glitch in July last year that saw scores of flights to and from the UK cancelled, prompting anger from airline chiefs.