Last Update: February 16, 2023, 08:23 IST
So far more than 200 flights have been canceled in Frankfurt
An IT failure at Lufthansa stranded passengers and forced flights to be canceled or diverted at Germany’s busiest airport on Wednesday, with the airline blaming railway engineering works that damaged broadband cables.
FRANKFURT: An IT failure at Lufthansa stranded passengers and forced flights to be canceled or diverted at Germany’s busiest airport on Wednesday, with the airline blaming railway engineering works that damaged broadband cables.
A spokesman for operator Fraport said more than 200 flights had so far been canceled at Frankfurt, an important international transit hub and one of Europe’s largest airports. Lufthansa expects the situation to stabilize by evening.
Data from FlightAware shows that 105 flights were also delayed as of 1243 GMT. Pictures and videos from several airports in Germany showed thousands of passengers waiting to check-in.
“We wanted to go to the wizarding convention in Blackpool in England. And now we are stuck here,” said Alexander Straub at Frankfurt airport. “We ate some pretzels and are still waiting,” his fellow passenger Mark Weidel said.
Lufthansa and Germany’s national train operator blamed the problem on third-party engineering works on a railway line extension, which occurred on Tuesday evening, when a drill cut through a Deutsche Telekom fiber optic cable bundle.
This caused passenger check-in and boarding systems at Lufthansa to seize up on Wednesday morning and prompted German air traffic control to suspend incoming flights, although these have since resumed.
Shares in Lufthansa, which also owns SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings, were down 0.8%, paring earlier losses, while Fraport shares were down 0.9% in early afternoon trade.
Passengers said on social media that the company was using pen and paper to manage flight boarding and was unable to process passengers’ baggage digitally.
Lufthansa said in a tweet: “As of this morning the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage due to construction work in the Frankfurt area.”
Deutsche Telekom said in a statement: “Two cables have been repaired overnight by our technical team and many customers are already back online,” adding that the situation was improving steadily.
Deutsche Bahn apologized for the inconvenience caused to Lufthansa passengers.
The IT system failure comes two days before planned attacks on seven airports in Germany, which is expected to cause potentially major disruptions at the Munich security conference where world leaders are expected to gather.
Scandinavian airline SAS said it was hit by a cyberattack on Tuesday evening and urged customers to refrain from using its app, but later said it had fixed the problem.
Unidentified assailants cut cables belonging to Germany’s public railways in December, in what was seen as the second act of sabotage against Deutsche Bahn in as many months.
Airlines canceled more than 1,300 flights and delayed more than 10,000 in the United States last month after a major government computer system went down.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)