Phone Glitch Had Major Repercussions Upon UK Airports This Weekend
Gabriel Roşu / 11 years ago
An issue regarding a phone glitch at the National Air Traffic Service (Nats) has had flights in and out of the UK grounded this weekend. Airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Cardiff and Glasgow were all affected by the phone glitch.
Apparently the cause of the problem was generated by a complicated internal telephone system, which failed completely. The system is used by controllers at traffic control centers such as the ones in Swanwick and Hampshire. However, Nats has announced at 19:30 GMT on Saturday that the problem had been fixed, but some airports had delays continue into Sunday. The crash happened when the system tried to switch from the nighttime mode to the daytime mode.
During the downtime, none of their computers worked, and instead of 3,500 flights, they have only been able to process around 2,800. Ryanair was most annoyed as it had to cancel many its flights and it could not sell so many overpriced sandwiches or charge for people carrying more than a paper napkin. Ryanair noted that 300 of its flights were delayed on Saturday, having 12 cancelled.
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