Disruption to budget airlines as French air traffic controllers strike and Stansted suffers power outage causing flights to be diverted

The airport later confirmed on its Twitter feed that power had been restored

Flight operations at London's Stansted Airport were disrupted today after a power outage led to some flights being diverted.

The airport later confirmed on its Twitter feed that power had been restored and flights were operating again from the single-runway 30 miles northeast of central London.

"The power outage is impacting flights," a spokesman had said earlier. "We suspect it is a power cut affecting the wider area but we do have back up generators."

Stansted, which is owned and operated by the Manchester Airports Group (MAG), is a base for a number of major European low-cost carriers including Ryanair.

Elsewhere today flights to and from France were facing disruption after a strike by air traffic controllers that prompted Ryanair, easyJet and Lufthansa to scale back their normal schedule.

France’s DGAC civil aviation authority had called for airlines to reduce services by 10 per cent.

In a statement, easyJet said: “EasyJet has been asked by the DGAC to reduce its French flights by 30 per cent and as a result will cancel at least 50 flights to and from Paris Charles de Gaulle, Paris Orly, Basel, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseilles and Toulouse.