CBC News says "more than 600" flights cancelled, El Mundo says 625

Two reports, two figures. We hold two reports on Tuesday's disruption to flights across Britain, and they count it differently.

The rounded figure is the sourced one. CBC News attributes its count to Flightradar24. El Mundo states 625 flat in its headline and does not say where the number comes from. Both can hold at once: one is a floor, the other a total.

Nobody is named as breaking it. Both reports give the cause as a technical fault. CBC News names the operator, NATS, and the airports hit — Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted — in the caption under its photograph, not in the text. In the body of both reports, the flights are cancelled and no one cancels them.

Who is counted. El Mundo names three affected parties, all of them airlines: easyJet, British Airways and Ryanair. Neither report gives a number of passengers, and neither quotes one.

Not settled. What the fault was. Whether it has been fixed. Whether the counts are departures, arrivals or both. How many passengers were held, and who bears the cost — neither report says.

What this is about. A single computer fault at the company that directs aircraft over Britain stopped flights on Tuesday 8 September 2026 — and left open how many were stopped, and who carries the cost.

How it got here. British airspace runs through one operator. NATS, once National Air Traffic Services, handles en-route control across the United Kingdom and the towers at a number of airports. It has been a public-private company since 2001, with the government holding a stake alongside airlines and its own staff, and it is regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority, which sets the charges airlines pay for every flight it handles. There is no second provider to route around, so one fault is a national one. It has happened before: over the August bank holiday in 2023, a failure in the system that processes airline flight plans forced controllers to work by hand and airlines cancelled flights for days.

Who is in it. NATS, which said it had put a fix in place and was working with airlines and airports on recovery. The airports named in the two reports we hold — Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and Birmingham. The airlines that lost the flights, among them easyJet, British Airways and Ryanair. The Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, whose department is NATS's largest shareholder and who said engineers were working on it. And Flightradar24, a commercial flight-tracking site, which is where CBC News says its count comes from — no official tally appears in either report.

What is at stake. The bill. Under the passenger rules Britain carried over from European Union law, an airline must offer a refund or a re-routing, and meals and a hotel where needed; easyJet said it would do that. Cash compensation on top is not owed where the cause is judged outside the airline's control, and air traffic control failures are usually treated that way. So the cause decides who pays.

Where it stands. NATS says the system is recovering. What broke, and whether it is fixed, neither report says.