The boss of the air traffic control provider Nats has been summoned to meet the UK transport secretary as the number of flight cancellations passed 1,900 in a second day of disruption for hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Martin Rolfe, who is facing increasing pressure to resign over a third major stoppage to flights in just over three years, is due to brief Heidi Alexander on Wednesday.

Rolfe ruled out a cyber-attack as a cause for the “technical issue” at air traffic control and defended the resiliency of the systems run by Nats, which provides services to 15 UK airports.

“We will be doing a very thorough and full investigation,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We have at this point ruled out a cyber-attack.

“I don’t believe we have ever seen an incident happen more than once. This will be something we haven’t seen in more than 50 years of operation. I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world both from a safety perspective and resilience perspective.”

Nats said the problem occurred in its flight processing system but was not the same fault as those that caused outages and mass disruption in 2023 and 2025.

However, Yvonne Moynihan, the managing director of Wizz Air UK, called on Rolfe to consider resigning over the repeated technical failures at Nats.

“In any industry when you’ve had three failures you need to consider three strikes and you’re out,” she told Today.

“A third time and a third excuse is not enough any more. What we need to see from leadership is accountability. There are serious questions about the resilience of the system. I think Nats and the leadership need to look deep inside themselves.”

On Tuesday, Nats said that the fix had been a “very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover”.

According to FlightRadar, 246 flights had been cancelled at Heathrow by 6am on Wednesday, while Gatwick passengers faced 33 cancellations.

In a statement on social media on Wednesday morning, Heathrow said: “Following yesterday’s Nats technical issue, flights are operating today, but some disruption may continue as airlines reposition aircraft and crew.

“Please check your flight status with your airline before travelling to the airport and only travel if your flight is confirmed to be operating.”

In a statement on X, Gatwick also said flights had resumed but the disruption was likely to continue.

Ryanair has said more than 65,000 passengers had been delayed and 50 flights cancelled, with the knock-on effects affecting flights across Europe. Europe’s biggest low-cost carrier repeated its demand for Rolfe to resign.

The airline’s chief operations officer, Neal McMahon, said: “Families travelling on holiday, people travelling for work and thousands of visitors to the UK have once again paid the price for Nats’ abhorrent failure.”

He said the government should “stop making excuses for repeated Nats failures and appoint a new leader capable of running the UK ATC system”.

The breakdown started at about 1pm on Tuesday and affected departing flights at many of Britain’s biggest airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.

London airports, as well as Manchester and Birmingham, were among the most directly affected. Flights to and from other airports around the UK, including Edinburgh and Belfast, were also disrupted.

The air traffic control problems follow an “isolated event” a year ago that caused widespread disruption, and appeared less severe than the full grounding of flights in August 2023, which prompted a parliamentary inquiry.

Flights around the UK are facing delays and disruption due to an air traffic control issue which has affected a string of airports including Heathrow and Gatwick and is expected to take “some time” to resolve.

Departures from London airports are most severely affected, with few take-offs since a fault was reported early on Tuesday afternoon.

Most flights due to depart Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and London City airports since 2pm appeared to have been delayed or are yet to take off. Flights from other airports around the UK, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Belfast airports, have also been affected.”

The air traffic control service Nats said at 1.46pm that it was “investigating a technical issue which is causing some disruption to flight departures”.

Nats later added that it had identified the problem, which was in its flight processing system. It said: “Our engineers are on site and working urgently to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. We recognise the ongoing disruption to travel, for which we sincerely apologise.

It continued: “Flights are still departing and airspace is open, but recovery will take some time. We will provide further updates as soon as possible.”

The UK’s biggest airport, Heathrow, said planes were continuing to arrive, although Eurocontrol said some inbound flights were being held at airports abroad, with disruption likely to continue until the evening.

In a statement, Heathrow added: “We are supporting our local Nats team in their efforts to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We will provide updated information when we have it.

“We apologise to those disrupted and advise passengers to check with their airline for latest flight information.”

Heathrow’s website showed several flights due to depart this afternoon have been cancelled. British Airways said it was experiencing some disruption and was in touch with its customers.

Belfast City airport warned of “some disruption” to flights after the technical issue affecting Nats.

“Due to the technical issue referenced below, there may be some disruption to flights due to arrive in and depart from Belfast City airport,” they said in a statement.”

A Birmingham airport spokesperson apologised to customers and advised them to “arrive at Birmingham airport (BHX) in line with their airline’s check-in requirements and to contact their airline directly for the latest flight information and updates.”

Edinburgh airport said it was aware of the issue which “may impact operations”.

One of the best-known scenes from the TV series The Inbetweeners is the four angst-ridden teenage characters shouting abuse at people queueing at a bus stop. Only losers take the bus, is the point – except they use a much ruder word. There’s also a statement, misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, that any man over the age of 26 using a bus was a loser. This idea is deeply ingrained.

But when I was an MP it became obvious that there wasn’t the same stigma attached to jumping on the bus in London as there often was in other big cities. It often wound me up that the rest of the country was expected to accept a suboptimal public transport system – so much so that it could be joked that only losers would use it – while London retained its excellent bus service, which it ran under public control.

And I remember thinking: why can’t we have something like this at home in Liverpool? Well, last weekend Liverpool city region combined authority began to roll back the Thatcherite belief that private was all good, while public was all bad. For the first time in four decades, buses in the Liverpool city region have begun to be brought back under public control, starting in St Helens in Merseyside before spreading across the rest of the region.

What does this mean? Instead of private operators deciding where and when buses run, we will set the routes, fares and standards. Our franchised buses will still be operated by third parties. But we will set the rules, decide what kind of network our communities need and hold operators accountable for delivering it. It is the biggest change to public transport in our region for generations. Nobody standing at a bus stop at six in the morning cares about the finer points of franchising legislation. But they do care whether the bus turns up; whether they can get to work on time, get their kids to school or college, or make it to a hospital appointment.

Public control means we can start putting passengers first, with more frequent services, more evening and weekend buses, better connections to hospitals and railway stations and simpler fares. And we have kept single bus fares capped at £2, the price they have been for the past four years.

Change will be immediate. A new express service now connects St Helens directly with Liverpool John Lennon airport. For a family heading on holiday, that may mean avoiding airport parking charges. For somebody looking to work at the airport, it could open up a job. These changes will make a massive difference to people’s lives.

And, for me, that gets to the heart of the argument for public control. A bus route that helps somebody take a job, gets a student to college or allows an older person to remain independent has a value that won’t always show up on an operator’s balance sheet. Markets have their place. But public control allows us to ask not simply, “does this route make money?” but “do our people need it?”

That principle doesn’t stop with buses. We have bought a £500m fleet of new trains and are working towards bringing Merseyrail services into public ownership in 2028. In the coming weeks, the Royal Daffodil – our first new ferry ’cross the Mersey in 60 years, built by a loyal local workforce – will make its maiden voyage.

For decades we were told that privatisation and deregulation would inevitably deliver better services and that the government’s job was to get out of the way. The experience of millions of passengers tells a different story.

When he was mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham and I spent years working together to make that case and show what can be achieved when local leaders have the power to shape the services their communities rely on. Now we have a Labour government bringing our railways back into public ownership and giving local leaders more power over the essentials that ordinary people depend on.

After decades in which the state steadily retreated from people’s lives, we have an opportunity to prove that active government can be a force for good again. That is what started in St Helens last weekend.

I want the Liverpool city region to have the best public transport system in the country. I want people to come here, get on one of our buses, trains or ferries, see what we have built and go home asking the same question I used to ask in London: why can’t we have this at home?