Flight departures from Frankfurt resuming as IT system recovers, says Lufthansa

GERMAN flag carrier Lufthansa said its IT system was recovering and flight departures from Frankfurt airport were resuming after a major IT failure left thousands of passengers stranded on Wednesday (Feb 15).

“The systems are rebooting. We hope we can restore flight stability. There are departures from Frankfurt again,” said a spokesperson for Lufthansa.

The German airline blamed the group-wide IT system failure on underground engineering works at a railway station in Frankfurt cutting several fibre optic cables.

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 0.8 per cent, paring earlier losses, while Fraport shares were 0.9 per cent down in early afternoon trading.

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 0700 GMT and about 120 in and outbound flights at the airport were cancelled.

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

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

According to Bloomberg News, Lufthansa had grounded all of its flights but the company told Reuters that it could not confirm that. “There are still flights in the air, they will not be brought to the ground,” a spokesperson for the company said.

Data from aviation website Flightradar24 showed that Lufthansa had 40 flights in the air at 1023 GMT, compared with 105 flights of rival national airline of Air France and 121 of 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 cyberattack 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 last month after the breakdown of a key government computer system. REUTERS