Overview

• A fire at the North Hyde electricity substation on March 21 caused a near 24-hour shutdown of Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest air hub.
• Approximately 200,000 passengers were affected, with over 1,300 flights canceled or diverted during the disruption.
• Investigations have been launched by the UK government and Heathrow to examine the causes of the outage and improve infrastructure resilience.
• The incident highlighted longstanding vulnerabilities in Heathrow's power supply system, which had been flagged in a 2014 report but not fully addressed.
• Heathrow resumed near-full operations by Sunday, but airlines and passengers continue to face residual delays and disruptions.