Flights to and from Edinburgh Airport continue to be delayed after an undisclosed IT issue grounded passengers for around an hour on the morning of Friday 5 December 2025.
Around 9:30 a.m., the airport issued a statement via its social media channels, confirming that no flights were currently arriving or departing from the facility due to an “IT issue” affecting its air traffic control provider.
“Teams are working on this issue and will resolve it as soon as possible,” the statement said.
In a series of messages posted online to affected passengers, Edinburgh Airport confirmed the downtime was not caused by “national issues”.
The airport issued a follow-up statement around 10:40 a.m. confirming that flights were resuming and the unspecified IT issue appeared to have been resolved.
At the time of writing, Edinburgh Airport had not provided any further information about the incident.
Meanwhile, the airport's departures and arrivals information website confirms that the incident appears to have had a knock-on effect on many flights scheduled to depart and arrive there before the end of the day.
Computer Weekly understands Edinburgh Airport's air traffic control services provider is Air Navigation Solutions, with the latter company's website citing a “long-term partnership” between the two organisations.
It says that Air Navigation Solutions is responsible for providing air traffic control and air traffic engineering. services at the airport.
Computer Weekly has contacted the company to clarify its working relationship with Edinburgh Airport and to see if it can shed further light on the cause of today's outage. However, at the time of publication, no response had been received.
IT issues are often cited as a factor in downtime at airports, which contributes to highlight vulnerabilities in some sites' legacy IT systems and data centers.while highlighting the broader technological challenges facing facility operators.
Additionally, given how widespread and high-profile disruptions caused by airport IT incidents can be, these sites have also found themselves the targets of cyber attacks.
For example, London Heathrow Airport was among the targets of a large-scale attack.ransomware cyberattack targeting the aviation industry, reported in September 2025.
This incident may be related to a ransomware attack on the systems of commercial aviation service provider Collins Aerospace, and caused flight cancellations and delays across EuropeThe airports affected are Berlin, Brandenburg, Brussels and Dublin, as well as London Heathrow.
Speaking about the incident at that time, ESET Global cybersecurity adviser Jake Moore said the cyber attack demonstrated how devastating IT problems can be for the aviation industry as a whole.
“When a supply chain is attacked in the airline industry, the disruption is devastating on a global scale. Because the disruption is caused by a third-party check-in and boarding systems provider, it shows how one point of failure can quickly spread across multiple countries, causing widespread problems,” Moore said.
