Ryanair is suing an air traffic control body for £5m (€6m) after 1,000 of its flights were delayed or cancelled when an engineer working at home couldn’t enter a password.

A glitch in the UK’s National Air Traffic Service (Nats) flight-tracking system caused it to crash.

A technician tried to log on from home but it would not accept his password.

It then took him 95 minutes to get to the Southampton headquarters as flights remained grounded on the August 2023 Bank Holiday weekend.

The incident took four hours to resolve.

Ryanair accused Nats of negligence, saying it took three hours to alert the carrier to the problem.