Nats fallen over again

[Mojo]

Seems like part of the UK ATC system has fallen over again, with some airports having no departures for a while but with operations now resumed and heavily limited. Flightradar shows planes at Heathrow still at the gate 4 hours after they should have departed, plus many planes on the ground still waiting for gates over 2 hours after landing.

Nats have issued a statement saying they are aware of what the issue is, and are still working to fix it.

Technical issue causing some disruption to flight departures - NATS

NATS provides safe and efficient air traffic services and innovative solutions to UK and international airports, airlines and governments.

www.nats.aero

We have identified that the issue was in our flight processing system. Our engineers are on site and working urgently to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. We recognise the ongoing disruption to travel, for which we sincerely apologise. Flights are still departing and airspace is open, but recovery will take some time. We will provide further updates as soon as possible.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Seems like part of the UK ATC system has fallen over again, with some airports having no departures for a while but with operations now resumed and heavily limited. Flightradar shows planes at Heathrow still at the gate 4 hours after they should have departed, plus many planes on the ground still waiting for gates over 2 hours after landing.

The obvious possibility here is that a certain vodka drinking nation might have been busy...

 

[rmHawk765]

The obvious possibility here is that a certain vodka drinking nation might have been busy...

You could be a little less discriminatory of the actual people of that country... as here, they don't exactly choose what their government gets up to.

Also, if this was a cyberattack it would've been all over the news and that certain nation would be blamed faster than anyone can make a reasonable assumption of what/who executed it.

 

[speedy1]

Most won't believe the many, many attacks on infrastructure were Russia unless there is a verified signed document by Putin saying "I did it - Yours, Putin".

edit: Crazy how many people refuse to accept we're in a hybrid war with Russia and have been for a long time. Yes I know there are other causes for things

 

[Bletchleyite]

You could be a little less discriminatory of the actual people of that country... as here, they don't exactly choose what their government gets up to.

To be honest I think that is so obvious that it would be a waste of wear on my keyboard to state it explicitly

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Today at 16:19 ==

Most won't believe the many, many attacks on infrastructure were Russia unless there is a verified signed document by Putin saying "I did it - Yours, Putin".

edit: Crazy how many people refuse to accept we're in a hybrid war with Russia and have been for a long time. Yes I know there are other causes for things

Well, quite. We clearly are, and this sort of thing has a very high chance of being some sort of cyberattack.

 

[rf_ioliver]

We clearly are, and this sort of thing has a very high chance of being some sort of cyberattack.

Extremely unlikely given how the NATS system is architected.

The last major failure was due to a route parsing error: https://jameshaydon.github.io/nats-fail/ so much more likely to be some software edge case or hardware failure than anything else.

 

[AntoniC]

The obvious possibility here is that a certain vodka drinking nation might have been busy...

Poland ?

 

[Howardh]

Just watched one flight land at Manchester. As a layman I ask two questions - where's the backup?

 

[mrmartin]

NATS sayign its back up but very little moving out. Will be an absolute nightmare getting this back, lots of eg LHR redirected to Stansted

 

[Sun Chariot]

Just watched one flight land at Manchester. As a layman I ask two questions - where's the backup?

As a former employee of the org, the cause might be data rather than the software or its hardware (and not yet known if it is on-prem or SaaS / IaaS).

The 2024 August Bank Holiday outage was due to spurious data from another Western European nation. The system routine correctly identified and failed the data. The corrective human action was, I understand, key to that delay.

 

[ox_chap]

Can the railway help out at least for the internal flights. Extra late train by Avanti or LNER? Sweep up those hoping to travel later today within the UK?

 

[gabrielhj07]

Eurocontrol:

All London airports arrivals only at reduced rate. Gatwick not accepting arrivals 1500-1800, Heathrow 1400-1600.

“Moderate to high” delays until 2000 throughout London.

 

[Mojo]

Looks like it’s now been 2 hours since the last departure from Heathrow. A Murican Airlines flight that was stood at the end of the runway for several hours has just taxied along the runway and seems to be heading back toward the terminal.

There’s a BA plane that’s been sat on the taxiway just off T5A for approaching 4 hours now. You’d be furious.

 

[Starmill]

Can the railway help out at least for the internal flights. Extra late train by Avanti or LNER? Sweep up those hoping to travel later today within the UK?

There’s plenty of space on the usual late trains after 1930 from London to Manchester and Newcastle. There's also free space on the usual 1930 London to Glasgow and 1930 / 2003 London to Edinburgh. A Lumo does run slightly later. Should the airlines have wished to rebook to these services there would be no problem accommodating the numbers, but they would be likely to be paying for it so will seek to get everyone on their own services first.