Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin After hours of chaos on Wednesday, especially at Frankfurt Airport, Lufthansa is heavily criticized. A failure of the group’s IT systems had ensured that around 230 of a total of 1000 planned take-offs and landings were canceled at the largest German airport alone by midday. The cause was construction work during which several fiber optic cables were severed the day before.
Passenger complaints piled up on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. “How can a single damage cause such a large amount of damage?” asked George Kyriazis, a technology expert at the Strasbourg-based consultancy EU-Lisa. “One eager excavator driver is enough, and one of the largest and most important airports in Europe is offline,” criticized Michael Asboe, IT manager at Tempton.
Others asked why Lufthansa had not secured itself with a redundant, i.e. additional system.
In particular, there was speculation about an insufficient IT structure of the MDax group. Just over a year ago, there was a momentous failure after the airline paralyzed its system with a failed update.
On Wednesday, the effects were even more devastating. Thousands of passengers, especially at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs, had to put up with delays and flight cancellations. The systems for boarding, among other things, had not been operational since the morning. A crisis team met at the Lufthansa headquarters in Frankfurt.
The group had meanwhile stopped all flights from Frankfurt.
(Photo: Reuters)
On the advice of the airport operator Fraport, the German air traffic control (DFS) had not allowed landings at the largest German airport for hours because there were not enough free parking spaces. The machines were diverted instead. Starts were still possible. From the early afternoon, DFS in Frankfurt allowed 40 approaches per hour and was thus approaching normal operations again.
Added to this was information chaos on Wednesday. Initially, it was said that all domestic Lufthansa flights were canceled. 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.
There were minor delays at the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings. According to the group, the IT of the airline subsidiaries Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines is not connected to the head office system. Construction work on an S-Bahn line near Frankfurt-Eschersheim had already caused damage to a fiber optic cable from Deutsche Telekom around 7 p.m. on Tuesday evening. A Telekom spokesman said on request that a concrete drill had destroyed four cables at a depth of five meters on Tuesday afternoon.
Over 10,000 private and hundreds of business customers in the Frankfurt area were affected by the outages. A kind of “fiber optic pipeline” was severed, said a spokesman, which supplies a particularly large number of connections with high-performance Internet connections.
However, it remained unclear why the failure of just one line had such serious consequences for Lufthansa’s IT. Telekom did not want to provide any further information about the specific product that Lufthansa had booked with her.
Experts puzzle over the failure
According to the group, a redundancy had apparently initially taken effect, which is why flight operations could be continued on Tuesday evening. Why this was no longer the case on Wednesday remained open. Lufthansa left a request unanswered. IBM, which works as an IT service provider for Lufthansa, did not initially respond to a request either.
The case leaves experienced IT experts at a loss. With high performance requirements such as critical infrastructures, connections from three independent network operators are common, said Andreas Weiss from Eco, the Association of the German Internet Industry. “Normally it is not possible for all systems to be paralyzed when a single cable is severed.”
At the same time, Lufthansa does have redundancies in order to usually maintain its flight operations in the event of major IT failures. In addition to the data center near Frankfurt, there is another system house in Norderstedt. But a back-up from there to the group’s headquarters was not possible on Wednesday, reports managers familiar with the matter. In addition to the fiber optic cable, the 5G network around the Hessian airport also failed.
IT failure causes massive disruption at Lufthansa
The group apparently only has to pay a limited amount for the damage. “This time Lufthansa is not to blame,” summarizes Lufthansa expert Gerald Wissel, head of the Hamburg consulting firm Airborne Consulting. The airline fell victim to a chain of unfortunate circumstances on Wednesday. Contrary to what was initially claimed by consumer advocates, affected passengers probably have no right to compensation in this case.
Nevertheless, Lufthansa is facing high additional costs. For example, the airline was obliged to offer its customers alternative transport after a delay of three hours. This is probably one of the reasons why Lufthansa made stranded passengers on Wednesday the offer to rebook to other airlines free of charge or to use the train.
If the delay is more than five hours, the airline is also obliged to refund the full ticket price. In the event of delays of more than two hours and a flight distance of more than 1,500 kilometers, she must also provide meals and drinks to passengers at the airport. If necessary, they even have to pay for accommodation and travel there.
The Lufthansa share initially fell by around 2.5 percent on Wednesday after the disruption became known, and in the late afternoon the shares were even slightly up again. According to the company, the systems were already up and running again. A largely normal process is expected for Thursday, it said.
There will be 24-hour strikes on Friday
But further chaos threatens the passengers of Lufthansa and other companies just one day later. The Verdi union is calling on workers at Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Bremen, Dortmund and Hanover airports to go on a 24-hour warning strike. “We urgently need better working conditions for employees in aviation, otherwise the next summer of chaos threatens,” said Verdi deputy chairwoman Christine Behle of the Handelsblatt.
The IT glitch affected the entire network of the Lufthansa Group on Wednesday.
(Photo: dpa)
Many airports had responded to the pandemic-related slump in air traffic with layoffs. When demand picked up again last summer, there were long waiting times, flight cancellations and problems with baggage handling due to a lack of staff. Little has changed about that, said Behle. Around 20 percent of the jobs lost in the wake of Corona have not yet been filled.
In addition to public sector employees working at airports, employees of private ground handling services have also been called to strike. This is likely to have a significant impact on air traffic. Fraport has already announced that all commercial flights will probably be cancelled. Around 1005 flight movements with around 137,000 passengers were planned for Friday.
There are also no regular flight operations in Munich, where international guests are expected to attend the security conference on Friday. The general manager of the airport association ADV, Ralph Beisel, criticized that a labor dispute at seven airports at the same time had “nothing to do with a warning strike”.
Cooperation: C. Kerkmann
More: Verdi is calling for industrial action at almost all major airports on Friday