NATS Blames Software Glitch for September Air Traffic Chaos, Rules Out Cyberattack
NATS publishes preliminary report on technical incident of 8 September
NATS, the UK's air traffic control provider, has released a preliminary report on the September 8 technical incident that disrupted flights. CEO Martin Rolfe confirmed the cause was a software issue in a specific part of the flight data system, unrelated to the August 2023 outage, and dismissed speculation of military intervention. The report was requested by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander; a full report will follow.
This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data
- macguillicuddy
Interesting! Looks like a race condition (with a 1ms window) during squawk allocation (the process that gives each aircraft a 4 digit identifier for ATC purposes) caused data corruption. They present that window as being small but 1ms is a decent chunk of time in our work lol
- zrail
Note: NATS the UK airspace manager, not NATS the pubsub system.
- lukaslueg
Would be interesting if the report actually got into the details. The curiously specific "approx. 1ms window" sounds like an off-the-shelf memory race condition in combination with a preempting thread, for which 1ms is an absolute eternity and Guaranteed To Happen By Tuesday This Week™. But the "database corruption" sounds like database IDs being generated from timestamps with 1ms granularity.