Groundedwaffe: Lufthansa Has Massive IT Failure, all Flights Grounded

[Bill]

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/l...ll-its-flights

FRANKFURT - A group-wide IT system failure at Lufthansa stranded thousands of passengers on Wednesday, which the German airline blamed on underground engineering works at a railway station in Frankfurt cutting several fibre optic cables.

Repairs would take until Wednesday afternoon according to Lufthansa, citing information it had received from Deutsche Telekom. It expects flight operations to stabilise by early evening.

Photos and videos from several German airports showed thousands of passengers waiting to be checked in.

Shares in Lufthansa, which also owns SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings, were down 1.25% at 12.44pm local time.

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.

In a tweet, Lufthansa said: “As of this morning the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage, caused by construction work in the Frankfurt region.”

According to the Frankfurt Airport website, reports of Lufthansa flight disruptions started from around 8am local time and about 120 in and outbound flights at the airport were cancelled.

Frankfurt Airport said it will cancel or divert all incoming flights to the airport.

German air traffic controllers said Lufthansa planes could no longer depart from Frankfurt Airport and were parked there, meaning no parking positions were available for other aircraft.

Bloomberg News said Lufthansa had grounded all of its flights but the company told Reuters it could not confirm that.

“There are still flights in the air, they will not be brought to the ground,” a spokesperson for the company said.

Data from aviation website Flightradar24 showed Lufthansa had 40 flights in the air at 11.23am local time, compared with 105 flights of rival national airline of Air France and 121 of British Airways.

Germany’s federal cyber agency BSI was not immediately available for comment.

The IT system failure comes two days ahead of planned strikes at seven German airports that are expected to lead to major disruptions, including potentially at the Munich Security Conference where world leaders are expected to gather.

Scandinavian airline SAS said it was hit by a cyber attack on Tuesday evening and urged customers to refrain from using its app, but later said it had fixed the problem.

Unknown attackers cut cables belonging to Germany’s public railway in December in what was seen as a second act of sabotage against Deutsche Bahn in as many months.

Airlines cancelled more than 1,300 flights and over 10,000 were delayed in the United States in January after the breakdown of a key government computer system. REUTERS

It's almost like there's a coordinated effort to destroy Western countries, maybe for a reset of some kind? A 'great reset?'

[Frankie the Fink]

Ach du lieber..

[Louie Detroit]

It must be fun being stuck in an airport with a bunch of irked Germans, “Und vhy not can you fly ze aircraft”?

[Mike Mercury]

No ticket !

[Onebadcad]

More than 200 flights cancelled at Frankfurt airport
More than 100 flights delayed
Deutsche Telekom says cables being repaired

Spit in the ocean compared to Southwest, we can outdo the germans in all things.

[tjfontaine]

Here's the thing - MANY if not MOST large companies keep putting off upgrading / improving their mission critical IT systems until it's too late - and THEN they often OVERSPEND buying into some big ass commercial system that doesn't do what was promised. Happened at my former company - we told sr. mgmt for years our old Cobol systems needed re-engineering to an improved architecture and let's do it BEFORE all the subject matter experts who knew the code AND the business processes retire or die. Nope. Then they spent close to 1 billion on a big ass ERP system over a 10 yr period - never fully delivered all the components. Airlines especially noted for this behavior.

[Yadkin]

Software "engineers" at it again....

[Tikiman]

“There are still flights in the air, they will not be brought to the ground,” a spokesperson for the company said.


Well, Princess, they're coming down one way or the other.