London: More than 1,000 flights were cancelled at UK airports on Tuesday following a technical failure at Britain's air traffic control service centre.

According to BERNAMA News Agency, the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) reported that technical issues were causing disruptions in flight departures at UK airports, including major London airports. In a statement, NATS mentioned, "We are investigating a technical issue which is causing some disruption to flight departures," later identifying the problem in its flight processing system.

FlightRadar24, a flight-tracking site, indicated that by 8 pm local time (1900GMT), over 1,000 flights had been cancelled due to the technical failure, affecting inbound flights to airports such as London, Manchester, and Birmingham. The Telegraph highlighted that the equipment failure occurred at the NATS headquarters in Swanwick, near Southampton.

The disruption impacted various parties, including the Arsenal football team, whose travel to Naples for their Champions League match against SSC Napoli was delayed. Sky News noted that the team had to extend their training session and were expected to arrive behind schedule after 9 pm local time (2000GMT).

Ryanair's Chief Operations Officer, Neal McMahon, criticized NATS CEO Martin Rolfe, pointing out "incompetence with yet another UK ATC System Failure" in a video statement. NATS later provided an update stating that recovery from the system issue took "longer than we had hoped." They added, "Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights."