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Flight chaos caused by software defect, says air traffic control body

The UK's air traffic control meltdown that cancelled 2,000+ flights was caused by a software defect that corrupted data in a millisecond, not a cyber attack.

The failure led to more than 2,000 flights being cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers affected.

The Long Sip
What happened

The UK's national air traffic service confirmed a software defect caused the system failure that disrupted hundreds of thousands of travellers earlier this month.

The detail

The defect occurred in a millisecond, corrupting data in the system that underpins the management of UK airspace, and took days to fully resolve.

What it means

Most affected passengers are unlikely to receive compensation because the regulator ruled it extraordinary circumstances, and a Civil Aviation Authority review is now underway.

For you

Passengers affected are unlikely to get compensation as the regulator classed it as extraordinary circumstances, so check with your airline and travel insurer about what you may be owed.

Full story at BBC

What readers are saying

Gordy
What struck me is that Martin Rolfe says safety was never in question, but nobody's really explained why a software defect in air traffic control didn't pose a safety risk. That seems like the thing people deserve clarity on.
graeme1955
The key detail here is that the defect happened in a millisecond and produced corrupted data in the system managing UK airspace. That's the kind of failure mode that's nearly impossible to catch in testing because you need to simulate millions of possible data states, and you've only got a fraction of a second to spot it before it cascades. This is why redundancy and backup systems matter more than people realise.
BankstownHassan
If you're travelling to or from the UK in the next few months, check your airline's policy on extraordinary circumstances versus their own service failures. The distinction matters for whether you get compensation, and most carriers haven't clarified where they draw the line.

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