NATS published a preliminary report, commissioned by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander, explaining the cause and immediate resolution of the technical incident on 8 September that caused widespread travel disruption. The chief executive, Martin Rolfe, confirmed the failure was unrelated to the August 2023 outage and not the result of military action. The problem stemmed from a software defect in a small component of the National Airspace System responsible for assigning identification codes to individual aircraft when requests are handled manually rather than automatically. While processing one manual request a higher-priority message caused the operation to pause; when the request resumed the faulty code produced corrupted output within milliseconds, which in turn affected some subsequent flight data updates.
With degraded flight information available to controllers, NATS imposed traffic restrictions to preserve safety. Although the bug directly affected London Area Control Centre traffic at higher levels (generally above 24,500 ft), restrictions were applied nationwide to allow a restart of the NAS and reload clean flight data. Restrictions lasted about six hours, operations returned the same evening, but recovery of the passenger backlog took more than two days and disrupted hundreds of thousands of journeys. Mitigations are in place and a permanent fix is undergoing safety testing ahead of deployment; NATS highlighted it has invested over £1bn in systems in the past decade and plans further investment up to 2033.
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