Bloomberg reports that following a computer failure at a central control center, London's airspace is shut down due to a tech glitch at the Swanwick air-traffic center in Hampshire that has caused a caused by a power outage, according to the NATS authority in press statement posted on its website.

A spokesman for National Air Traffic Services said: "We apologize for any delays and our incident response team has been mobilized," adding, "Every possible action is being taken to assist in resolving the situation and to confirm the details."

IB Times notes that traffic arriving to and departing from Heathrow, Europe's most active airport, as well as Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and City Airport were all experiencing delays due to the glitch, which has delayed flights at airports by hours. At the moment, there are no tentative plans to reopen the airspace until after 7 p.m. local time on Friday evening.

The problem plagued a program that co-ordinates the flights coming into London and puts the flights in sequence as they come into land or take off, according to the BBC by an unnamed source. The British new source also reported occurrences across the country that placed flights in limbo:

  • Heathrow: Flights are "currently experiencing delays" but planes now landing and taking off
  • Gatwick: Flights are now departing but still subject to delays
  • Stansted: Flights still landing, no flights departing
  • Bristol: Limited departures reported
  • Luton: All flights experiencing delays but planes now leaving
  • Edinburgh: No queues but passengers being advised to check with their airlines
  • Southampton: Experiencing ''problems''
  • Oxford: Experiencing "some delays," mainly to services arriving from overseas
  • Leeds Bradford: All flights out and most flights in suspended until 19:00
  • Aberdeen: Reported an "impact" on operations

According to Bloomberg, the Swanwick operations room was designed to give NATS 30 percent more capacity, helping it manage the en-route airspace with 3 million flights a year from England and Wales by 2020 from about 2 million when it opened.

Thanks to the power outrage, schedules at London's Heathrow were thrown into dismay, which had 141 departure delays, representing 21 percent of flights, as of 3:40 p.m. local time, according to FlightAware.com, an aviation tracking website. That's about a quarter of flights.

A similar incident occurred in July of this year.

"Obviously there are safe diversion airports quite nearby in the UK, but it will be a very serious disruption, particularly for departures," said Justin Bronk, an aerospace technology expert at the Royal United Services Institute.