Lufthansa IT meltdown strands thousands of passengers

An IT failure at Lufthansa stranded thousands of passengers on Wednesday. The airline blamed underground engineering works at a railway station in Frankfurt, which it said had cut several broadband cables. It said repairs would take until the afternoon, citing information it received from Deutsche Telekom. Meanwhile, there were reports of thousands of passengers struggling to board flights. On social media, some travellers said they were being checked in with pen and paper while computer systems were down. The chaos cast an evil spell for at least two men. We wanted to go to the wizard convention in England, say these two, but now we're stuck here instead.

At Frankfurt airport, around 200 flights were cancelled. German air traffic controllers said Lufthansa planes could no longer depart. That meant parking spots were full for incoming jets, which then had to be diverted. Lufthansa refused to confirm media reports that it had grounded all services, saying some flights were still in the air. Its shares fell over 1% following news of the problems, but later paired some of the losses. Now travellers to Germany may have more pain to come. Wednesday's IT failure comes two days ahead of strike action that is expected to cause further major disruption at the country's airports.

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