Frankfurt — An IT failure at Lufthansa unleashed chaos at major German airports on Wednesday and upended the travel plans of thousands of passengers.
Various computer systems, including the one for boarding flights, stopped working on Wednesday morning. The airline blamed construction work on a rail line in Frankfurt for the mass outage.
All of Lufthansa's domestic flights were cancelled and passengers were asked to change to the train. International arrivals were also affected, resulting in missed flight connections.
Air traffic control closed Frankfurt to landings to prevent Germany's major air hub from maxing out its capacity amid the raft of delays and cancellations.
The incoming planes were diverted to airports in Nuremberg, Cologne and Dusseldorf. Take-offs were initially still possible in Frankfurt but then they, too, were stopped.
Passengers and planes were jammed in Lufthansa's second hub Munich, although air traffic operations were not suspended.
The company thinks that construction work on a railway line in Frankfurt triggered the problems. Several Deutsche Telekom fibre-optic cables are said to have been cut by an excavator on Tuesday.
According to a report by the local news portal Hessenschau, the disruption affected telecomunnications in the greater Frankfurt area, particularly in the north. The airport is located in the west of Germany's financial hub.
A Lufthansa spokesman denied reporting that all flights worldwide have been cancelled. He noted that in Zurich, for example, only a flight to Frankfurt was scrubbed.
The Lufthansa Group includes subsidiaries like Eurowings and Swiss International Air Lines.
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