Status: 02/16/2023 12:29 p.m
A hacker attack could be responsible for the failure of the websites of several German airports. The debugger is still running. Effects on air traffic are not yet known.
The websites of various German airports are disrupted. “We are still troubleshooting,” said a spokeswoman for Dortmund Airport. However, it is unlikely that the failure is due to a regular overload. “There is a suspicion that it could be a hacker attack.”
The websites of the airports in Düsseldorf, Hanover, Nuremberg and Erfurt-Weimar were also temporarily affected. “We suspect a DDoS attack to be behind it,” said a spokesman for Nuremberg Airport. The website was down from around 8:10 a.m. to around 11:40 a.m.
Effects on air traffic as a whole were not initially known.
Similar incident back in January
In so-called DDoS attacks, a website receives so many requests within a short period of time that it collapses due to overload. Such an incident had already occurred at German airports, including Hamburg, at the end of January.
At Lufthansa there was a failure of its IT systems on Wednesday – but not due to a hacker attack. An IT malfunction due to a fiber optic cable being severed during construction work on the railway in Frankfurt temporarily paralyzed Lufthansa flight operations at its most important hub.