Germany’s air traffic control agency announced on Wednesday that all flights to and from the country’s busiest airport, Frankfurt, have been diverted due to a major disruption caused by a problem with Lufthansa’s computer systems. Robert Ertler, the agency spokesman, said that all plane parking spots in Frankfurt are full as passengers and crew are unable to board the airline’s flights. He added that all incoming planes are being diverted to alternative airports such as Munich, Nuremberg and Duesseldorf.
Lufthansa Group, which includes subsidiaries like Swiss International Air Lines and Eurowings, stated that the IT outage was caused by construction works in the Frankfurt region. Deutsche Telekom later confirmed that an excavator had cut through fiber optic lines at a depth of five meters (16 feet) while working on a railroad line. The company said that parts of the destroyed line had already been repaired and the situation will improve significantly in the course of the afternoon.
As a result, all of Lufthansa’s domestic flights have been canceled and passengers are being urged to switch to alternative forms of travel, such as trains.