Full marks must go to NATS press department that managed to hide all reference to the distrubtion on Wednesday 9th Jan,caused at Heathrow the fact the engineers could not get much help from the Canadian supplier was not a great help but may not have been of much help
because....
.wait for it their EFPS system was unable to process the new ICAO code for Jo'burg (changing from FAJS to FAOR) on the flight plans
The flights dep on 9th SAA235 plus the BAW flight,to Johnnesburg as FAOR came in at 10/0001 the flight plans were filed with Destination ZZZZ (either an IFPS change or filed as such by SAA at JNB code not changed !!)
The Swanwick NAS system accepted the code by manual input.
Temporary fix to input all Johannesburg flights into NAS as ZZZZ ,with remarks (Field 11 in NAS carrying the correct ICAO destination.
Not sure exactly how Heathrow's EFPS takes its full info as we have also had issues with Saudi Arabian (SVA) flights not populating a proper destination on the EFPS