Flights to and from Edinburgh Airport are continuing to be beset by delays, after an undisclosed IT issue grounded passengers for around an hour on the morning of Friday 5 December 2025.
The airport issued a statement via its social media channels at around 9.30am, confirming that no flights were currently arriving or departing from the site due an “IT issue” affecting its air traffic control provider.
“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve as soon as possible,” the statement added.
Over the course of a series of messages, shared online with affected passengers, Edinburgh Airport confirmed the downtime was not caused by a “national issue”.
At around 10.40am, a follow-up statement was released by the airport, confirming that flights were resuming, with the unspecified IT issue seemingly resolved.
At the time of writing, no further details about the incident have been released by Edinburgh Airport.
Meanwhile, the airport’s live departures and arrivals information site confirms the incident appears to have had a knock-on impact for many of the flights that are scheduled to take off and arrive there for the rest of the day.
Computer Weekly understands that Edinburgh Airport’s air traffic control provider is a company called Air Navigation Solutions, with the latter company’s website talking about the “long-term partnership” that exists between the two entities.
It states that Air Navigation Solutions is responsible for providing air traffic control and air traffic engineering services to the airport.
Computer Weekly contacted the company to clarify its working relationship with Edinburgh Airport, and to see if it could shed any further light on the cause of today’s outage. At the time of publication, however, no response had been received.
IT issues are often cited as a factor in downtime incidents at airports, serving to underscore vulnerabilities in some sites’ legacy IT systems and datacentres, while highlighting the broader technological challenges site operators face.
Also, given how widespread and high-profile the disruption caused by an IT incident at an airport can be, these sites have also found themselves the targets of cyber attacks.
For example, London Heathrow Airport was among the targets of a wide-scale, aviation industry-focused, ransomware-based cyber attack that came to light in September 2025.
That incident could be traced back to a ransomware attack on the systems of commercial aviation services supplier Collins Aerospace, and caused flight cancellations and delays across Europe, with Berlin, Brandenburg, Brussels and Dublin airports all affected, along with London Heathrow.
Speaking about the incident at the time, ESET global cyber security advisor Jake Moore said the cyber attack served to highlight just how disruptive IT issues can be to the aviation industry as a whole.
“When the supply chain is attacked in the aviation industry, the disruption hits on a damaging global scale. Since the outage stems from a third-party provider for check-in and boarding systems, it shows how a single point of failure can ripple quickly across multiple countries, causing widespread problems,” said Moore.
