According to Lufthansa, the situation at Frankfurt Airport is slowly stabilizing. Departures are therefore possible again. The cut fiber optic cable at a railway construction site has so far led to the cancellation of a good 230 take-offs and landings. According to the railway, the demand for train tickets has increased only slightly due to the breakdown.
After numerous flight cancellations and delays, Lufthansa started to boot up its computer systems again in the afternoon. "We will feel the effects throughout the day," said a spokesman. Departures from Frankfurt are possible again. For Thursday, however, a largely normal process is expected again before there will be new problems on Friday due to the airport warning strike called by Verdi. Accordingly, Frankfurt Airport would also be on strike all day. In Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart and many other major cities, almost no machines should take off on Friday.
According to the operator, a good 230 take-offs and landings were canceled at Frankfurt Airport by the afternoon. Operations are gradually stabilizing, reported the airport operator Fraport. Around 1,000 take-offs and landings with 114,000 passengers were planned for the day as a whole. In the meantime, air traffic control had prohibited the landing of further jets so that the airport would not fill up.
On Wednesday morning, the systems for boarding, check-in and crew planning, among other things, failed. The previous evening, an excavator cut several fiber optic cables from Deutsche Telekom at a railway construction site. Why did the comparatively banal cause have such far-reaching effects? It is actually standard for operators of critical infrastructure to have double and triple security, says Rüdiger Trost, an expert at the IT security company Withsecure. At the same time, attempts are made to avoid bottleneck constructions. "If an IT system fails unexpectedly, there is a backup system that takes over the work, comparable to a spare tire in a car." It still has to be clarified why switching to the replacement lines led to the failures.
The damage is likely to quickly run into the millions, and Lufthansa will presumably stick to its service providers. A railway spokeswoman said the question of liability came too early. "We are currently clarifying together with Telekom and the construction company how the damage could have happened." Lufthansa also wants to clarify the situation instead of clearly assigning blame.
According to its own statements, Deutsche Bahn only recorded a “slightly increased demand” in the trains due to the IT breakdown at Lufthansa. "Around 200 long-distance trains arrive at Frankfurt Airport every day, making Frankfurt Airport the sixth-largest station in Germany," the group said. "Due to Frankfurt Airport's very good long-distance connections, the passengers who transferred had good travel alternatives and the trains usually had sufficient capacity." The day of the week also played a role: on Wednesdays there is usually not as much going on in long-distance traffic as on Fridays just before the weekend.
The destroyed cables on a railway construction site led to a number of climate jokes on Twitter. "Deutsche Bahn is now boldly tackling the transfer of air traffic to rail," wrote Fabio de Masi, a former member of the Bundestag for the left. "Deutsche Bahn is knocking out Lufthansa" or "Bahn is getting more customers" were similar comments.
Other users of the network rated the connection between an airline's IT problems caused by railway construction work as a symbol for "Germany, somewhere between digitization and the turnaround in traffic" or jokingly assumed a climate activist to be an excavator driver. Telekom itself worried on Twitter with a wink that the cables themselves were not safe deep underground. "Even at a depth of 5m, our fiber optics are not safe from concrete drills. After Düsseldorf at the weekend, now also in Frankfurt," wrote the company. According to railway information, a cable in a cable bundle from Telekom was severed by a "commissioned construction company" during construction work on the S6 in Frankfurt.
