Thousands of passengers are facing continued disruption across Britain tonight after a major air traffic control failure led to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and widespread delays.

The technical problem affected airports across the country on Tuesday, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, London City, Stansted, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.

National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said the problem involved its flight processing system and has now been resolved, but warned that clearing the resulting backlog was taking longer than expected.

“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped,” NATS said.

“Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights.

“We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption. We know this is hugely frustrating and apologise unreservedly. Passengers should continue to check with their airline.”

More than 1,000 arrivals and departures were reported cancelled during the day, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports across the UK.

Heathrow suspended arrivals on Tuesday while departures later resumed, with large numbers of passengers waiting inside terminals for information about their flights.

Some passengers travelling from Heathrow to New York were reportedly left sitting on aircraft for up to seven hours.

London City Airport was particularly badly affected, with more than 60 per cent of flights cancelled, while 91 per cent of flights at Manchester were reported delayed.

Hundreds of individual services were also affected at the country’s biggest airports, including 352 flights to and from Heathrow, 281 at Gatwick, 249 at Manchester and 101 at Birmingham.

Airlines faced significant disruption as schedules unravelled.

Flight tracking figures cited in the report showed 218 easyJet flights had been cancelled, alongside 132 British Airways services, 42 Ryanair flights, 37 KLM services and 22 Eurowings flights.

Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been affected and launched a strongly worded attack on NATS management.

Chief operating officer Neal McMahon called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to be replaced, accusing the organisation of repeated failures.

Wizz Air also criticised NATS, saying a provider responsible for critical national infrastructure should not repeatedly bring the Aviation system to a standstill.

Rolfe said he accepted responsibility for the organisation’s performance but stressed his immediate focus was on safely resolving the disruption.

NATS had not established the cause of the technical failure by Tuesday evening. The report said there was no indication at that stage that it had resulted from a cyber attack.

Manchester Airport warned passengers that disruption was expected to continue for the remainder of Tuesday while airlines attempted to recover their schedules.

Passengers have been advised to continue travelling to airports for their scheduled departure times unless told otherwise by their airline and to check directly with carriers for the latest information.

The incident comes three years after a major NATS outage in August 2023 caused widespread disruption and ultimately affected more than 700,000 passengers.

Further delays and cancellations could continue as airlines work to reposition aircraft and crews following Tuesday’s disruption.