Passengers at Edinburgh Airport faced flight delays and cancellations on Friday morning after a technical glitch with air traffic control systems forced the closure of the runway. File photo by Tolga Bozoglu/EPA-EFE
Flights resumed taking off and landing at Edinburgh Airport after an air traffic control IT outage forced the closure of the runway for around an hour on Friday morning.
The glitch, which the airport said was localized and not related to a wider internet outage involving Cloudflare that took out websites and apps, saw domestic and international flights to and from destinations including London, Birmingham, Belfast, Amsterdam and Frankfurt canceled, diverted or delayed.
British Airways and budget carriers Easyjet and Ryanair were among the airlines impacted.
Transatlantic services operated by United Airlines and Delta Air Lines were also affected, with the Delta flight from New York forced to reroute to Dublin.
Some passengers reported their flights were held on the tarmac for up to two hours.
The disruption persisted hours after flights resumed at around 10:40 a.m. local time due to backlogs and aircraft and crews ending up in the wrong places at the wrong time.
In a statement online, the airport thanked passengers “for their patience and understanding” following what it said was an IT issue suffered by its provider of air traffic control services.
The BBC reported that given the company affected was London Gatwick Airport-headquartered Air Navigation Solutions, and not the much larger National Air Traffic Services responsible for the bulk of U.K. airspace, the problems were localized and did not cascade into wider disruption.
“Safety is our number one priority, and our engineers worked at pace to restore system capability as quickly as possible,” said a spokesman for ANS.
NATS pledged to step up to assist and support affected airlines in any way it could.
Edinburgh Airport, which handles around 43,000 passengers daily with flights to 155 destinations, was among scores of airports hit by the Crowdstrike outage in July 2024, causing global travel disruption.
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