It’s not a good day to be flying with Lufthansa Group, or to be traveling through Frankfurt Airport.
In this post:
Lufthansa Group comes to standstill worldwide
Lufthansa Group is currently facing an IT outage, which is causing massive flight disruptions around the globe. These issues apply to all Lufthansa Group airlines, including Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian, Brussels, Eurowings, and Eurowings Discover.
The IT issues were triggered by construction work being done on Germany’s railroad lines, as several fiber optics cables from Deutsche Telekom were damaged by an excavator near the carrier’s headquarters and largest hub in Frankfurt.
Lufthansa Group’s entire global network has come to a screeching halt, with hundreds of flights canceled, delayed, and even being diverted. This is impacting everything from the ability for passengers to check-in, to the ability for flights to be dispatched. Lufthansa Group currently estimates that operations will resume on a consistent basis by this evening.
Frankfurt Airport shuts down altogether
As perhaps one of the most extreme examples of what’s going on, Frankfurt Airport has completely stopped accepting arrivals, even by non-Lufthansa Group airlines. That’s so that the airport doesn’t get overwhelmed with even more ground traffic than it already has. With no flights departing, the airport also doesn’t want to handle any more arrivals.
So this morning we’ve seen flights to Frankfurt either canceled or diverted, to avoid even further traffic there.
You can expect that even once the IT issues are resolved, the impacts on operations will last for quite some time, given the domino effect of operational issues in the airline industry. After all, it can be hard to reposition crews and planes where they need to be following an outage like this.
What makes the timing of this even worse is that the trade union representing many airport ground workers is expected to strike at major airports in Germany on Friday, as part of an ongoing labor dispute. So even if operations do recover by tomorrow or so, expect things to get worse again on Friday, unless that strike is called off.
Bottom line
Lufthansa Group is facing a massive IT outage this morning, caused by some cables being damaged on Germany’s rail lines. Lufthansa Group flights worldwide have been canceled and delayed, and flights are even being diverted. Furthermore, Frankfurt Airport has shut down altogether. If you’re scheduled to fly with Lufthansa Group today, good luck…
What do you make of this Lufthansa IT outage?
I was connecting to Zürich on an F award from USA. On landing we had to park in very remote spot and wait 25 minutes for buses. F crew pulled out some champagne to help pass the time!
Lovely staff in the FRA F lounge suggested my best option was to take a train. She gave me a voucher for a first class rail ticket which I presented at the Deutsche Bahn counter, and...
I was connecting to Zürich on an F award from USA. On landing we had to park in very remote spot and wait 25 minutes for buses. F crew pulled out some champagne to help pass the time!
Lovely staff in the FRA F lounge suggested my best option was to take a train. She gave me a voucher for a first class rail ticket which I presented at the Deutsche Bahn counter, and the journey took about five hours (I was also hit by delays on the rail service and missed a connecting train in Basel. Still I was in my hotel in Zurich by 7pm rather than 3pm based on my original flight.
Top marks to the way LH staff handled this for me. I bet it would have been a different story in Y.
Every SME has IT back up solutions in place and does not rely on one cable to their main operation. This is just another major management glitch of LH.
And now my flight from BOS to MUN is cancelled tomorrow night....
Maybe you can fly to Caracas and take the bus to MUN?
Going to Northern Italy so trying Milan/Venice/Zurich/Innsbruk
Got rebooked a day later with a connection. This was caused by the strike so I will hopefully having a successful claim
no you will not. In this case, the strike is out of Lufthansa's control. The airport staff is on strike. Not Lufthansa staff.
I was walking out of the LH lounge in Berlin to go to my gate when I got the message that my flight to FRA was cancelled. Complete shit show ensued at the LH lounge, all the trains around 1100 out of BER to FRA were booked within minutes, had to upgrade to First Class on DB just to get a seat reservation. DB was a shit show too, all of the extra pax made for standing room only in 2nd Class. It me 5 hours and 4 trains to get from BER airport to FRA airport.
I'm sure the union will see this crisis and decide to pitch in and not selfishly seek to exploit the situation further to leverage it for their own gains....
This is a disaster recovery architecture as cheap as the company... with 2M EUR I may get load balancing, network decoupling , some kind of server or db failure configuration, or on premise/cloud configurations... Shit hansa (SX), the 5 bluff airline by Skytrax. If one mere cable cause this its very worrying...
This incident reminds me of several conversations I had with a very, very senior airline’s industry consultant on LH. LH’s unwillingness to modernize, capital investment, do better because they are the biggest airline in Europe.
haha...and on friday following airports will close completely: Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg
Every other country should be asking Germany and the EU why FRA can't isolate LH's problems to LH and has to take down an entire airport if even for a minute.
The US regularly, at the request of individual airlines, issues ground stops at specific airports for specific airlines based on their problems. The rest of the airport and the entire Germany economy cannot and should not be held hostage to LH's problems.
They are the dominant carrier. As a result of gate and remote parking availability the airport has to be temporarily closed.
It’s a knock on affect. One aircraft can’t move from its gate therefore another can’t move in until it’s available. Consequently atc introduces flow restrictions.
And the entire German economy is not being held hostage by the accident. You can access Germany by flying into MUC, CGN, HAM etc. Or by flying to CDG or AMS and taking the train to where ever you need to go.
There is no way that any US airline would accept if a Delta operational problem in Atlanta or an American operational issue in DFW resulted in the shutdown of the entire airport and nor should they... let alone carriers from other countries.
There is plenty of space in FRA for LH planes to be parked if they couldn't get their operational straightened out fairly quickly
other airlines do not use LH's gates and vice versa.
...There is no way that any US airline would accept if a Delta operational problem in Atlanta or an American operational issue in DFW resulted in the shutdown of the entire airport and nor should they... let alone carriers from other countries.
There is plenty of space in FRA for LH planes to be parked if they couldn't get their operational straightened out fairly quickly
other airlines do not use LH's gates and vice versa.
It is and should be unacceptable for an entire airport to grind to a halt because of the failure of a single airline
Feel free to let us know examples of other airports that have been entirely shut down because of operational problems at a single airline esp. in the US
You are aware that major parts of the metropolitan area of Frankfurt did not have internet or mobile connection Tuesday night/Wednesday morning?
At some point, backup lines were also running out of capacity due to internet traffic of many hundred thousand households. So it’s more than a small Lufthansa it glitch
was it the Russians?
Seems odd to me that LH has a fiber optic arrangement with no redundancy or alternative routing capability which led to a single point failure of its entire system.
not too odd to me
On 08OCT23 the entire train network in northern germany was put to an halt because the GSM-R system (which trains use for communication) sabotaged.
Admittedly, both cables were destroyed.
It is very nice to see Lufthansa acting as a cultural ambassador for Germany. Now people around the world are having the classic DB construction chaos experience!
Just one datacenter, no replication to a hot spare. Any design like this would be illegal on a plane and yet airline IT is still amateur hour.
Funny enough that it's only plugged from one cable... I would imagine given the importance of LH as a client, both economically and socially for the cables company, they would plug much more cables for redundancy purpose
Or have a wireless backup like Starlink to connect their network.
@Klaus
One could find arguments for almost everything. But here Frankfurt Airport has decided to close. That is definitely out of control by Lufthansa.
This is a masterpiece of Deutsche Bahn's strategy to get people from planes into traines.
Frankfurt closed because of Lufthansa and not vice versa.
Dont plan on LH giving you a DIME - they will call this a force majeure - and leave you stranded. LH cares more about its wallet than its passengers.
Couldn't agree more...one of the worst customer service
I am scheduled to fly from MUC to FRA on the 787 in a little less in 4 hours…so let’s wait and see how that works out…
…if I want to rebook now they would charge me a fare difference :) so why pay 250€ if I can get 250€ (questionable if this is EU261 - but one could argue that manual backup process in case of IT errors can be expected from an airline)
Looks like you're lucky today. LH has started departures in FRA again, and obviously landings as well - I can currently see a previously diverted flight going from DUS to FRA.
MUC is operating "more or less" as usual anyways, so your flight might get some delay but should be fine otherwise.
Not good. I am already on my way to Hauptbahnhof…
:)
Okay, the JNB plane that was diverted to MUC also is en route to FRA. But according to the news, all domestic flights are cancelled today.
Well... FRA-DRS is just about to depart. MUC had domestic flights to all airports except FRA already during the last hours. The complete domestic stop was earlier today, but is not really true anymore.
Of course currently it's the typical information chaos, with old and new information being mixed. I'm sure there will still be quite some domestic cancellations for operational reasons to get the planes ready for "normal schedule" tomorrow, but within the...
Well... FRA-DRS is just about to depart. MUC had domestic flights to all airports except FRA already during the last hours. The complete domestic stop was earlier today, but is not really true anymore.
Of course currently it's the typical information chaos, with old and new information being mixed. I'm sure there will still be quite some domestic cancellations for operational reasons to get the planes ready for "normal schedule" tomorrow, but within the next 1-2 hours I expect most of the future departures to be scheduled again.
On the other hand, if you got a train seat to FRA already that's of course the safest solution right now.
I'm really curious about what will happen with compensation claims afterwards. Obviously LH will claim that the cable damage was out of their hands, but some people might argue that it's an obvious lack of redundancy. Courts might judge in the end (and that can take a few years I'm afraid).
German newspaper BILD is citing a lawyer that EU261 would not apply here.
I don't fully see why LH wouldn't take responsibility here... how can an airline like LH have such large dependency placed on one single point (the damaged cable) with no active redundancy? I don't know if I'm missing something here, but to me this seems like a very poor risk management strategy from their side and the mere lack of redundancy should be enough of a ground to object a "force majeure".
I work...
I don't fully see why LH wouldn't take responsibility here... how can an airline like LH have such large dependency placed on one single point (the damaged cable) with no active redundancy? I don't know if I'm missing something here, but to me this seems like a very poor risk management strategy from their side and the mere lack of redundancy should be enough of a ground to object a "force majeure".
I work at an IT company in Germany and let me tell you that if something like this were to affect us, it would result in those responsible for risk management having to give *a lot* of explanations and some people's jobs would be on the line.
Funny how for so many people, they immediately think of compensation rather than safety and getting to their destination. Sadly the world we live in. Am sure they will de donating to the Turkish earthquake fund.
Not apply because cancellation is due to FRA airport closure which is outside of LH control...
I would rather hop on the next ICE. Air travel today will be a ....
Try first class and reserve a seat.
already did. Fun fact: My LH ticket is changeable but not refundable for free. So now you can guess: Did LH waive the 70 EUR cancellation fee for a flight that was supposed to be cancelled but in the end took off with a 30 minute delay?