Thousands of passengers worldwide were stranded on Wednesday after a major IT fault at Germany’s flagship carrier Lufthansa caused flight delays and disruption at airlines across the group.
Construction work in the German city of Frankfurt damaged several fibre-optic cables of Deutsche Telekom and caused the IT system failure at Lufthansa worldwide, the airline said.
Flights were delayed and cancelled, with operations not expected to stabilise until Wednesday evening, said Lufthansa.
Photos and videos from several German airports showed chaos, with thousands of passengers waiting to be checked in.
Shares in Lufthansa, which also owns SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings, were down 1.5 per cent at around 10.15am, in the wake of the issue.
Passengers said on social media 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.
Lufthansa said in a statement on Wednesday morning: “Fibre-optic cables belonging to a telecommunications service provider were damaged during construction work on tracks in Frankfurt, causing an outage of Lufthansa’s IT systems at the airport in Frankfurt.
“Flight operations are expected to stabilise in the early evening.
“Lufthansa asks affected passengers to check the status of their flight on the company’s app or website before arriving at the airport. Passengers with domestic flights can switch to Deutsche Bahn until Sunday.
“We regret the inconvenience this will cause our passengers.”
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, commonly shortened to Lufthansa, is the flag carrier of Germany.
When combined with its subsidiaries, it is said to be the second-largest airline in Europe in terms of passengers carried.
Germany’s federal cyber agency BSI was not immediately available for comment.
