Dusseldorf Thousands of passengers suffered delays and flight cancellations on Wednesday due to a global IT glitch at Lufthansa. The computer systems for boarding, among other things, had not been operational since the morning. A spokeswoman in Frankfurt explained that they are working intensively on a solution. A crisis team met at the Lufthansa headquarters at the airport.
On the advice of the airport operator Fraport, German air traffic control had not allowed landings at Germany’s largest airport for hours because there were not enough free parking spaces. Instead, the machines were diverted to other airports such as Nuremberg, Cologne or Düsseldorf. However, starts were still possible in Frankfurt.
Since 1:20 p.m., 40 approaches per hour have been possible again, which is close to current normal operation, a DFS spokeswoman said on Wednesday. According to Fraport, there were more than 200 flight cancellations by noon. More than half of these were arrivals.
Deutsche Telekom: Excavator damaged fiber optic strand
Initially, it was said that all domestic Lufthansa flights were canceled. The passengers were asked to transfer to the train. All of the airline’s departures were stopped in Frankfurt. Domestic connections at other airports took place again in the afternoon.
The failure of the IT systems was caused by construction work on an S-Bahn line near Frankfurt-Eschersheim on Tuesday evening around 7 p.m. There, the S6 is being expanded to four tracks by a contracted construction company. The railways immediately informed Deutsche Telekom about the damage, the railways said.
A Telekom spokesman confirmed on request that an excavator had destroyed the cable when drilling five meters deep. In the meantime, part of it has been repaired, and the rest is being worked on feverishly. Due to the depth of the construction site, however, the repair work is difficult. It is not clear when these will end.
A Lufthansa spokesman said the computer systems could probably be restored by late afternoon. However, it will take longer for flight operations to normalize.
There were minor delays at the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings. Austrian Airlines announced that flights to Frankfurt had been suspended. According to Lufthansa, the IT of the airline subsidiaries Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines is not connected to the system at the headquarters in Frankfurt.
The Lufthansa share fell by around 2.5 percent on Wednesday after the disruption became known.
With agency material.
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