Flights grounded across all major UK airports leaving passengers stranded

Flights across the UK have been temporarily grounded due to an ongoing issue at major airports across the country.

The disruption is due to a technical failure at air traffic control headquarters Nats, which is responsible for guiding flights to all UK airports.

It's understood that major transport hubs such as Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast City, Aberdeen, East Midlands, Liverpool and Glasgow, as well as London's Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and London City airports have all been impacted.

Nats has since acknowledged that a 'technical issue' with its 'flight processing system' is responsible for causing the outage and said that it will 'take some time' for normal travel to resume.

"Our engineers are on site and working urgently to resume normal operations as quickly as possible," a spokesperson for Nats said.

"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."

(PA)

The statement continued: "We will provide further updates as soon as possible.

"Passengers should check the status of their flight with their airline."

A spokesperson for Nats has since told The Telegraph there is 'nothing to suggest' the technical failure has been caused by a cyber incident.

The outlet added that reports of a 'data processing' failure had first been reported at around 1pm this afternoon, with flights out of Heathrow and Gatwick expected to be disrupted until 7pm

Around 200 flights were cancelled this afternoon because of a UK air traffic control issue, and that number is expected to rise, flight monitoring website Flightradar24 added.