U.K. air traffic control says ’technical issue’ affecting flights on a busy travel day

LONDON (AP) — Thousands of airline passengers faced delays on Monday after Britain’s air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the U.K. on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Lyudmila Hristova said she and her husband had planned to attend a niece’s wedding in Bulgaria, but their flight from Heathrow was canceled.

“Now we are looking for some information on how we can arrange another flight,” she said. “It is so difficult, they just got us out of the airport, it was very rude. There was no information, just some leaflets and that’s it.”

NATS said the outage had hit its ability to process flight plans automatically, meaning the plans had to be input manually, a much slower process. It did not disclose the cause of the problem.