Why air traffic in Italy has slowed down this morning

Since this morning, air traffic across Italy has been severely disrupted due to a series of faults in the data transmission network that supports air traffic control services throughout the country. This was announced by Enav, the state-owned company that manages civil air traffic in Italy. There are delays and some cancellations at various airports.

The anomalies were detected during the night. Thanks to the activation of the emergency systems put in place for such cases, explains Enav, air traffic was managed as normal until 6 am this morning, without any reduction in operational capacity. From 6 a.m., however, with the gradual increase in flights and the problem persisting, Enav introduced traffic flow management measures, which entail a temporary reduction in the number of aircraft that can be handled in Italian airspace. In practice, to ensure safety, air traffic controllers are managing fewer aircraft at any one time, and this is causing a knock-on effect of delays and cancellations.

Enav has ruled out the possibility that the anomalies are linked to malicious activity, meaning they are neither the result of a cyberattack nor sabotage. Technical investigations, which are still ongoing, have identified the source of the problem as the data transmission network, and the company is working to understand the causes and restore full operational capacity.

At Fiumicino Airport in Rome, four flights have been cancelled so far – to Milan Linate, Riyadh, Tirana and Trieste – and around twenty are experiencing delays of between 15 and 60 minutes. Aeroporti di Roma, the company that manages the airport, advises passengers to check the status of their flight with their airline.

The data transmission network is an infrastructure that is largely out of sight but essential: it connects control centres, airports and radar stations, and transmits radar data, weather reports and messages exchanged with pilots. In Italy, airspace is divided into four Area Control Centres, all managed by Enav: Milan Linate for the North-West, Padua for the North-East, Rome-Ciampino for the South-West and Brindisi for the South-East. This time, unlike on other occasions, the problem affects the network on a national scale.

This is not the first time that a fault of this kind has halted or delayed flights. On the evening of 28 June 2025, a fault in the radar data transmission system at the Milan Control Centre affected around 320 flights in northern Italy. ENAV attributed the incident to a connectivity issue with the external provider, TIM, which affected both the main and backup connections. TIM rejected this account, maintaining that its redundant systems had functioned normally and that there had been no disruption attributable to its network. Another fault, on 20 October 2024, was caused by a problem with the air traffic management software and brought traffic to a standstill for around 40 minutes. On that occasion, a backup system capable of handling around 35 per cent of normal traffic was brought into operation.