On Friday, a nationwide IT outage disrupted police systems at German airports, affecting border control and causing longer immigration queues for passengers arriving from outside the European Union's Schengen zone. A federal police spokesperson confirmed the issue, stating that officers were forced to manually process passengers due to the system failure.
"Our colleagues have to do a lot of things manually that the system used to do. We're still managing to get it done at the moment," Mirror quoted a police spokesperson responsible for Frankfurt airport, Germany's busiest, as saying.
A spokesperson for the airport posted on X: "Currently, there are nationwide disruptions in border control for flights to and from non-Schengen areas in Germany. As a result, delays may occur during both entry and exit. EU destinations and other Schengen Area member states are not affected. The cause is a nationwide IT malfunction at the Federal Police. We regret the inconvenience and kindly ask you to check the status of your flight with your airline or travel operator."
This came nearly three months after a technical problem at Germany’s air traffic control agency caused disruptions, with some flights cancelled at Frankfurt Airport, the country’s biggest.
The air traffic control company DFS said the problem that arose Friday morning affected flight plans and weather data. It was resolved by 10:30 a.m. but caused delays of varying severity across the country.
Frankfurt Airport warned on its website that flight delays and cancellations could be expected throughout the day. Operator Fraport said about 70 flights were cancelled but didn’t expect many more because the data problem had been resolved, German news agency dpa reported. The country’s biggest airline, Lufthansa, said there were a few cancellations and delays but long-haul services weren’t affected.
