Berlin – German flag carrier Lufthansa’s information technology systems were down on Wednesday, affecting thousands of passenger flights.
According to the company, the outage was triggered by damage to fibre optic cables caused by construction work on a railroad line in Frankfurt.
“Unfortunately, this has led to flight delays and cancellations,” Lufthansa said via Twitter, without giving exact figures. “We are working on a solution swiftly.”
The airline's domestic flights were all cancelled and passengers were asked to switch to trains. In Frankfurt, Germany’s largest airport, the airline’s departures were all temporarily halted.
The fibre optic line was damaged on Tuesday evening, according to Deutsche Telekom AG.
As a result, not only air traffic was disrupted but internet, telephone and television services were cut in the greater Frankfurt area.
“We are continuing to work at full speed on the repair,” Deutsche Telekom said on Wednesday via Twitter. “The situation is improving continuously.”
A few days earlier, there had already been a large-scale disruption of the Deutsche Telekom network in Düsseldorf due to a similar accident.
About 15 000 internet users were without a connection, including the North Rhine-Westphalia state government.
The flight chaos on Wednesday affected Frankfurt and Munich.
Planes were diverted to other airports, such as Nuremberg, Cologne or Düsseldorf.
To a lesser extent, the operations of Lufthansa subsidiary airlines Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Swiss were also hit.
Further air travel disruptions are expected at the end of the week as a wage strike has been announced for Friday, February 17, at German airports.
Lufthansa expects “a large number of flights” to be affected.