Edinburgh airport resumes flights after services suspended due to IT problem

Original article by Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent

Flights have resumed at Edinburgh airport after it suspended operations on Friday morning because of an IT issue in air traffic control.

Planes were beginning to take off at about 10.40am, according to a statement posted by the airport on social media.

Some planes had waited for about two hours to depart, and some disruption and delays were expected to persist. Inbound flights had been diverted.

A spokesperson for the airport said: “Flights at Edinburgh airport have now resumed following the IT issue with ANS (Air Navigation Solutions), our air traffic control provider.

“We thank passengers for their patience and understanding.”

Passengers were earlier advised to contact airlines for information on flights as the airport and its service provider worked to resolve the problem. Those waiting in the terminal were left unsure for about an hour after the suspension was announced, before news came that operations could resume.

EasyJet, British Airways and Ryanair flights were among the airlines caught up in the disruption, with a number of afternoon flights subsequently cancelled and others subject to severe delays. Transatlantic flights operated by Delta and United Airlines were also affected, including an incoming Delta flight from New York that was diverted to Dublin.

Among the passengers affected was a mother from Swindon, who said the delays to her flights would mean she would miss her youngest child’s last nativity play. The woman, identified only as Felicity, told the BBC she had travelled up to Edinburgh for a work meeting, and said: “My youngest is in her last nativity and due to the delays I can’t make it home on time.”

More than 15 million passengers a year – an average of 43,000 a day – fly in and out of Edinburgh, making it Scotland’s biggest airport, with flights to 155 destinations.

Air traffic control issues – and IT failures – have become one of aviation’s most recurrent problems. Edinburgh airport also closed because of a global IT problem with CrowdStrike last July.

Edinburgh’s air traffic control services are provided by ANS, which blamed a “technical issue” for the outage. A spokesperson said: “Safety is our number one priority, and our engineers worked at pace to restore system capability as quickly as possible.

“We regret the inconvenience that this is causing and thank everyone for their patience.”

Nats, which manages most of the UK’s airspace, and has suffered its own high-profile meltdowns, said during the outage it would “work closely with the airlines impacted and support as best we can”.

The problem on Friday was understood to be unrelated to the Cloudflare outage that affected websites around the world including Transport for London and Zoom.