A day after a catastrophic IT breakdown at Lufthansa left thousands of passengers detained at Frankfurt airport, at least three German airport websites were down on Thursday.
Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, and Dortmund were among the airports that were impacted, although Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin’s major airports continued to run smoothly.
Focus Online, the source of the initial news of the outage, provided no explanation.
“We are troubleshooting”, said a spokesperson for Dortmund airport, adding it was unlikely that the failure was due to a regular overload. “There is reason to suspect it could be a hacker attack,” said the spokesperson.
Spiegel Online reported that the problems could have been caused by a DDos attack, where high volumes of internet traffic are directed to targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid by so-called “hacktivists” to knock them offline.
