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As usual the media (including El Reg) tells us almost nothing about the nature of the outage. Based on the diverse spread of airlines impacted I would surmise that it is the common-user front end system that has had problems rather than the departure control systems of the airlines involved. The common user system at Manchester is (from memory) MUSE from ARINC (Now part of Rockwell-Collins). I imagine there are people awake in Annapolis already this morning.