Lufthansa IT failure leaves thousands of passengers stranded worldwide

FRANKFURT - A group-wide IT system failure at Lufthansa left thousands of passengers stranded on Wednesday (Feb 15), which the German airline blamed on underground engineering works at a railway station in Frankfurt cutting several fibre optic cables.

Repairs would take until Wednesday afternoon, according to Lufthansa, citing information it had received from Deutsche Telekom. It expects flight operations to stabilise by early evening.

Photos and videos from several German airports showed thousands of passengers waiting to be checked in.

Shares in Lufthansa, which also owns Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings, were down 1.25 per cent at 12.44pm (local time).

Passengers said on social media that the failure had forced the company to organise the boarding of planes with pen and paper and that it was unable to digitally process passengers’ luggage.

In a tweet, Lufthansa said: “As of this morning, the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage, caused by construction work in the Frankfurt region.”

According to the Frankfurt Airport website, reports of Lufthansa flight disruptions started from around 8am (local time), and about 120 inbound and outbound flights at the airport were cancelled.

Frankfurt Airport said it will cancel or divert all incoming flights to the airport.

German air traffic controllers said Lufthansa planes could no longer depart from Frankfurt Airport and were parked there, meaning no parking positions were available for other aircraft.

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Bloomberg News said Lufthansa had grounded all of its flights but the company told Reuters it could not confirm that.

“There are still flights in the air, they will not be brought to the ground,” a spokesman for the company said.

Data from aviation website Flightradar24 showed Lufthansa had 40 flights in the air at 11.23am (local time), compared with 105 flights of rival national airline Air France and 121 for British Airways.

Germany’s federal cyber agency BSI was not immediately available for comment.

The IT system failure comes two days ahead of planned strikes at seven German airports that are expected to lead to major disruptions, including potentially at the Munich Security Conference, where world leaders are expected to gather.

Scandinavian airline SAS said it was hit by a cyber attack on Tuesday evening and urged customers to refrain from using its app, but later said it had fixed the problem.

Unknown attackers cut cables belonging to Germany’s public railway in December, in what was seen as a second act of sabotage against Deutsche Bahn in as many months.

Airlines cancelled more than 1,300 flights and over 10,000 were delayed in the United States in January after the breakdown of a key government computer system.