Millisecond Software Defect Caused UK Flight Chaos
Millisecond Software Defect Caused UK Flight Chaos
The News
Britain's air traffic control operator NATS says a software defect caused the Sept. 8 outage that grounded thousands of flights, according to findings released Friday.
The National Air Traffic Services probe found the failure was "caused by a software defect in a small part of the National Airspace System (NAS)," the Daily Mail reported.
Sky News reported the investigation found the error happened in a millisecond — and was not caused by a "military operation."
The Numbers
More than 2,000 flights were cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected, BBC News reported.
Timeline
An outage hits the UK's National Airspace System, grounding thousands of flights and disrupting hundreds of thousands of passengers.
NATS says the outage was caused by a software defect, Reuters reports. The Daily Mail reports the government has ordered a further probe while declining to sack the NATS boss.
Reactions
NATS said the outage that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was caused by a software defect, according to Reuters.
The investigation rejected suggestions that a "military operation" was behind the failure, Sky News reported, pinning it instead on a software problem that occurred in a millisecond.
The government ordered a further investigation but stopped short of firing the under-fire head of NATS, the Daily Mail reported.
What's Next
The further government-ordered probe into the failure is still to come, per the Daily Mail, and pressure remains on NATS leadership over the airline industry's handling of the collapse.
Poll
Should the head of Britain's air traffic control operator lose his job over the outage?
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