Massive tech meltdown disrupts airports across Britain

Authorities are working to determine the cause behind a massive disruption that hit airports across Britain following a major technical meltdown that left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded inside packed terminal buildings, while forcing more than 1,750 flights to cancel.

As detailed in air traffic tracker Flightradar24, up to 1,300 flights were axed to and from UK airports on Tuesday. 177 more have been cancelled so far on Wednesday.

Multiple media reports suggest the cascading disruptions stem from a glitch at National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the country's primary air traffic management provider.

The NATS chief Martin Rolfe says things go wrong "relatively infrequently" and engineers are urgently working hard to resolve the issues.

Rolfe says: "We absolutely take responsibility for this. That technical issue took a while, it took longer than we would normally have liked for it to get resolved."

"And we resolved it to get back to our systems operating normally, but of course there's a huge amount of disruption that's now built up in the system and we're working very closely now with airlines and airports to try to work through the night to make sure that we can get as many people travelling as possible."

NATS has implemented a fix in its flight processing system Tuesday evening but delays continue to ripple across 15 airports nationwide.

London's Heathrow, Stansted and City airports, along with airports in Manchester, Birmingham, Scotland and elsewhere have warned passengers to check the status of their flight with their airline.

Major carriers including British Airways, EasyJet, KLM and Lufthansa have been affected, with some warning the significant knock-on impact of the system failure will continue to cause widespread disruption.

British Airways says it was forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights, Ryanair reports more than 65,000 of its passengers faced severe delays, and EasyJet points out some of its flights were "unable to operate."