IT Failure Grounds Lufthansa Flights Worldwide

By Chris Liakos, Livvy Doherty, and Anna Cooban, CNN

(CNN) – Another day, another system failure with flight cancellations and delays.

A company-wide IT outage at German airline Lufthansa has left thousands of passengers stranded in airports around the world.

The international airline, one of Europe’s biggest, said in a statement Wednesday that construction work in Frankfurt had damaged the fiber optic cables of a telecoms service provider, resulting in an outage in Lufthansa’s IT system in Frankfurt airport.

“Currently, the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage. This is causing flight delays and cancellations. We regret the inconvenience this is causing our passengers," Lufthansa said on Twitter.

Lufthansa owns carriers Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, and Swiss.

In a separate statement on its website, Lufthansa recommended that passengers in Frankfurt avoid traveling to the city’s airport.

Passengers with domestic flights can switch to Deutsche Bahn – Germany's national rail service – for free until Sunday, the airline added.

Lufthansasaid that it expected its operations to “stabilize” in the early evening.

Shares in the company were down 0.8 percent.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.