The airline experienced a serious IT system failure on Wednesday.
(Photo: Reuters)
Dusseldorf Thousands of passengers suffered delays and flight cancellations on Wednesday due to a global IT breakdown at Lufthansa. The computer systems for boarding, among other things, have not been operational since 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.
All Lufthansa domestic flights were initially canceled and passengers were asked to switch to the train. All of the airline’s departures were stopped in Frankfurt.
Passengers and planes were backed up in Munich and at Frankfurt Airport. The German air traffic control is therefore no longer directing any machines to Frankfurt. This is to prevent the hub from filling up, as a spokesman for air traffic control confirmed.
Lufthansa: Disruptions also affect Eurowings, Austrian, Brussels and Swiss
The machines would be diverted to other airports such as Nuremberg, Cologne or Düsseldorf. However, starts were still possible in Frankfurt. For Munich there was initially no blocking of air traffic control.
According to a Lufthansa spokesman, the cause of the disruption lies with Deutsche Telekom. They carried out construction work on their network in Frankfurt and damaged an important cable in the process. Initially, no statement could be reached from Telekom.
The IT glitch affected the entire network of the Lufthansa Group on Wednesday.
(Photo: dpa)
The two German hubs in Frankfurt and Munich are not the only ones affected by the IT outage. The disruptions affect the airline’s entire international air traffic. This also included subsidiaries Eurowings, Austrian, Brussels and Swiss. Delays and cancellations are currently also occurring in Lufthansa freight traffic.
Some of the group’s planes still took off in the morning, with the suitcases missing due to check-in problems. “Because of the IT problems, we couldn’t read the barcodes on the luggage,” reports a spokesman. However, it will be delivered later in any case.
In the meantime, however, there are almost no more take-offs and landings by the Lufthansa airlines. “We are working feverishly on a solution,” it said on request in Frankfurt. However, this would be difficult without Deutsche Telekom repairing the damage. The Lufthansa share fell by around 1.6 percent on Wednesday after the disruption became known.
With agency material
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