All flights had been grounded at Edinburgh Airport for round 4 hours on Sunday afternoon and night as a consequence of an IT challenge with air-traffic management.

The failure is believed to have begun at about 2.30pm, forcing at the least a dozen inbound planes to be diverted to Glasgow, Newcastle and Manchester, from areas together with Istanbul, Gran Canaria and Tenerife.

No less than 18 flights are cancelled, to locations together with Amsterdam, Cologne and Berlin. Round 5,000 passengers have had flights cancelled or diverted.

In a put up on X, Edinburgh Airport stated that “no flights are presently taking off or touchdown” as a consequence of an “IT challenge with air-traffic management”.

The airport added: “Engineers are working to resolve the difficulty. Passengers ought to test their flight standing with their airline earlier than travelling to the airport.”

Departures resumed at 6.42pm, with a Ryanair flight to Cork taking off 4 hours not on time. Disruption will proceed for the remainder of the night and into Monday morning with plane, crew and passengers out of place.

In accordance with the flight knowledge specialist, Cirium, Edinburgh Airport was anticipated to see 303 flights as we speak (152 departing and 151 arriving) – equating to over 50,000 seats.

In a later replace on Sunday afternoon, the airport stated engineers are “persevering with to work” on the IT challenge.

Edinburgh is Scotland’s busiest airport, dealing with round 40,000 passengers per day.

Air-traffic management on the airport is dealt with by Air Navigation Options Ltd (ANSL) – which says it “supplies each aerodrome and radar air-traffic management companies in addition to air site visitors engineering companies”.

This can be a competitor to Nats, the principle UK air-traffic management supplier, which suffered a nationwide failure of each its primary and back-up programs on 28 August 2023.

The Unbiased is searching for extra data from Edinburgh Airport and ANSL.

Hundreds of passengers are nonetheless on the airport ready for flights to depart to European cities, vacation locations and long-haul hubs.

Lots of the passengers affected by cancellations had been searching for to hook up with intercontinental flights at airports together with London Heathrow, Paris and Amsterdam.

Already, the primary Monday morning Edinburgh-Paris departure on Air France has been cancelled due to the disruption.

Beneath air passengers’ rights guidelines, all travellers whose flights are cancelled are entitled to be flown to their ultimate vacation spot as quickly as doable, together with on a rival provider, and supplied with meals and, if obligatory, lodging, whereas they wait.