On July 30, 2025, the UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) experienced a technical failure at its Swanwick control center, disrupting air traffic across the country. For roughly 20 minutes, flight operations were suspended or limited—British Airways reduced capacity at Heathrow from 45 to 32 flights per hour—and hundreds of departures and arrivals were delayed, canceled, or diverted. The outage affected major airports in England and Scotland including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Airlines, particularly Ryanair, harshly criticized NATS leadership and called for the resignation of CEO Martin Rolfe, while the UK government initiated investigations into system resilience. Although the issue was resolved later in the day, a significant backlog and lingering delays persisted, affecting tens of thousands of passengers.
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