Is EasyJet's incorrectly filed plan behind UK's air traffic control failure?

Authorities are investigating if a French airline's improperly filed travel plan could have caused the recent air traffic control system failure in the United Kingdom (UK), leading to the cancellation of thousands of flights in the country's worst disruption in over ten years.

Despite the seven-hour "network failure" that left many travellers stranded, experts predict that the disturbance will persist throughout the week, despite efforts to address the issue on Monday afternoon, Daily Mail reported.

Almost 1,000 aircraft were grounded, cancelled, or delayed as a result of "technical issues," according to Britain's National Air Traffic Services (NATS), on one of the busiest days of the year, when more than a million people were scheduled to fly into or out of the UK.

French airline EasyJet may have filed an incorrect plan, leading to a recent flight failure, according to sources quoted by The Times. Passengers are warned of "days of disruptions", potentially lasting until Friday.

An EasyJet pilot described the failure as unprecedented in 20 years of flying.

Officials are aware of the cause of the outage but not how it disabled the system. A cyber attack was ruled out by NATS. Over 500 flights were cancelled, with hundreds more aborted.

Meanwhile, data analysts estimated that 3,054 flights were to arrive in UK airports on Monday, with another 3,049 flights departing, which meant that over a million people were scheduled to leave or arrive in the UK.

The flight cancellations followed a "huge failure" of the national air traffic control system causing chaos on the August Bank Holiday Monday.

NATS said that it experienced "technical issues" that required controllers to move from an automatic system for landing and dispatching flights to a manual one.

"Flight plans are being input manually which means we cannot process them at the same volume, hence we have applied traffic flow restrictions," NATS said.

NATS resolved the technical issue affecting air traffic control systems at 3:15pm and is working with airlines and airports to support affected flights. However, Transport Secretary Mark Harper stated that "flights are still unfortunately affected."