On Thursday, the websites of several German airports experienced disruptions, prompting experts to investigate a possible online attack. This incident occurred a day after Germany’s national carrier, Lufthansa, faced a major IT failure that left thousands of passengers stranded at Frankfurt Airport. The affected airports included Düsseldorf, Nüremberg, Erfurt-Weimar, and Dortmund, with their websites either not accessible or displaying failure messages. However, Germany’s largest airports in Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin were operating without any issues.
According to a Dortmund Airport spokeswoman, they are still troubleshooting, and it is unlikely that the failure was caused by regular overload. She suspects a hacker attack, and Nüremberg Airport in northern Bavaria reported that its site collapsed due to a large number of requests.
The German news magazine, Spiegel, suggested that the problem could be due to a massive DDos attack, which involves directing heavy internet traffic at targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated attempt to take them offline. Fortunately, there were no reported effects on air traffic.
On Wednesday, Frankfurt Airport faced travel chaos when cable damage at a construction site caused a computer system failure, leading to the cancellation of over 200 flights. As of now, investigations are ongoing to determine the cause of the airport website disruptions.
