Technology

Edinburgh Airport grounds flights as a consequence of IT problem affecting air site visitors management supplier


Flights to and from Edinburgh Airport are persevering with to be beset by delays, after an undisclosed IT problem grounded passengers for round an hour on the morning of Friday 5 December 2025.

The airport issued an announcement through its social media channels at round 9.30am, confirming that no flights have been at the moment arriving or departing from the positioning due an “IT problem” affecting its air site visitors management supplier.

“Groups are engaged on the problem and can resolve as quickly as attainable,” the assertion added.

Over the course of a sequence of messages, shared on-line with affected passengers, Edinburgh Airport confirmed the downtime was not brought on by a “nationwide problem”.

At round 10.40am, a follow-up assertion was launched by the airport, confirming that flights have been resuming, with the unspecified IT problem seemingly resolved.

On the time of writing, no additional particulars in regards to the incident have been launched by Edinburgh Airport.

In the meantime, the airport’s reside departures and arrivals data website confirms the incident seems to have had a knock-on impression for lots of the flights which might be scheduled to take off and arrive there for the remainder of the day.

Laptop Weekly understands that Edinburgh Airport’s air site visitors management supplier is an organization referred to as Air Navigation Options, with the latter firm’s web site speaking in regards to the “long-term partnership” that exists between the 2 entities.

It states that Air Navigation Options is accountable for offering air site visitors management and air site visitors engineering companies to the airport.

Laptop Weekly contacted the corporate to make clear its working relationship with Edinburgh Airport, and to see if it may shed any additional mild on the reason for in the present day’s outage. On the time of publication, nonetheless, no response had been acquired.

IT points are sometimes cited as a consider downtime incidents at airports, serving to underscore vulnerabilities in some websites’ legacy IT programs and datacentres, whereas highlighting the broader technological challenges website operators face.

Additionally, given how widespread and high-profile the disruption brought on by an IT incident at an airport could be, these websites have additionally discovered themselves the targets of cyber assaults.

For instance, London Heathrow Airport was among the many targets of a wide-scale, aviation industry-focused, ransomware-based cyber assault that got here to mild in September 2025.

That incident might be traced again to a ransomware assault on the programs of economic aviation companies provider Collins Aerospace, and induced flight cancellations and delays throughout Europe, with Berlin, Brandenburg, Brussels and Dublin airports all affected, together with London Heathrow.

Talking in regards to the incident on the time, ESET international cyber safety advisor Jake Moore mentioned the cyber assault served to spotlight simply how disruptive IT points could be to the aviation {industry} as an entire.

“When the provision chain is attacked within the aviation {industry}, the disruption hits on a harmful international scale. Because the outage stems from a third-party supplier for check-in and boarding programs, it reveals how a single level of failure can ripple rapidly throughout a number of nations, inflicting widespread issues,” mentioned Moore.