Flights delayed and cancelled at Edinburgh Airport after IT issue affected air traffic control

Flights to London Gatwick, Bristol, Amsterdam and Frankfurt have been cancelled

All flights were halted at Edinburgh Airport this morning due to an IT issue with air traffic control.

The airport announced all flights from the Scottish hub have now resumed, but many passengers may still face delays and cancellations throughout Friday.

According to the airport’s live departure and arrival boards, one flight from Manchester was diverted, about 12 flights were cancelled, and 20 flights were facing delays, with some by more than two hours.

Flights to London Gatwick, Bristol, Amsterdam and Frankfurt have been cancelled. Others, including flights to London and Dublin, have been delayed.

Some passengers have reported being stuck in planes on the runway on Friday morning.

According to the airport’s live departure and arrival boards, many flights were either diverted or cancelled (Getty/iStock)

Passengers said they were “gutted and stressed” when they heard their flights had been cancelled.

Morven McCall and Cody Stevenson, both 19, told Sky News they were due to travel to Amsterdam on their first holiday together. But when they arrived at the airport, there was an announcement that their flight had been cancelled.

"I was ill over the summer and had to cancel two holidays already. This was our first time going away together,” Morven said.

Another passenger told the broadcaster they were told the airfield was closed due to air traffic control halfway through boarding their flight.

The airport explained on social media platform X that the outage was a localised issue, and advised customers to contact their airline for information on their flight.

A spokesperson for Edinburgh Airport said: "Flights at Edinburgh Airport have now resumed following the IT issue with ANS, our air traffic control provider. We thank passengers for their patience and understanding."

The issue was due to an IT problem at air traffic control (PA Archive)

It comes after an earlier announcement that all flights had been halted, which read: “No flights are currently operating from Edinburgh Airport.

“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve as soon as possible. We will provide updates when possible - please contact your airline for the latest information on your flight.”

It is understood that the issue was not linked to the earlier Cloudflare outage. Visitors to a number of pages saw a “500 internet server error” warning, rather than the content they expected, on sites including X, Substack, Canva and Down Detector.

The airport is the sixth-busiest in the UK, and the busiest in Scotland. It was used by 15.8 million passengers last year.

Nats, which manages most of the UK’s airspace, said during the outage it would “work closely with the airlines impacted and support as best we can”.

An Air Navigations Solutions (ANSL) spokesperson said: “This morning a technical issue affected one of our systems at Edinburgh Airport and it impacted flight operations.

“Our technical capability has now been reinstated and flights have since resumed.

“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.”

It is not yet known exactly how many passengers were affected by the incident.