Flight chaos caused by millisecond software defect, says air traffic control body

Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Thousands of passengers were delayed by the NATS outage

An air traffic control failure that sparked widespread travel chaos earlier this month was caused by a "software defect" affecting the system underpinning UK air space management, the national air traffic service Nats has said.

The problem happened "in the space of a millisecond", Nats said, leading to the system producing corrupted data.

The failure led to more than 2,000 flights being cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers affected, with some sleeping on airport floors or getting stuck overseas.

Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe told the BBC he would not resign, saying the software defect was "very, very obscure."

"You can fly to almost anywhere from almost any airport at almost any time. If that stops, even for a moment, then you get huge disruption.