Suspected cyberattack continues to disrupt flights at European airports
發佈日期: 2025-09-21 21:03
TVB News
A suspected cyberattack on major international airports across Europe continued to snarl flights and strand tens of thousands of passengers.
Airport authorities on Sunday said more delays are expected as sweeping disruptions persist.
A European Commission spokesperson said the origin of the attack was still under investigation.
The aviation outages that hit Europe starting Friday was traced to a "cyber-related disruption" of Collins Aerospace, a provider of check-in and boarding systems for several airlines at airports globally.
Its parent company RTX admitted having technical issues in the Multi-User System Environment software at "select airports" and said it was working to fix it as soon as possible.
According to a statement, the impact is "limited to electronic customer check-in and baggage drop and can be mitigated with manual check-in operations."
Long queues and chaos in Berlin's Brandenburg Airport.
A service provider for its passenger handling systems was attacked on Friday evening, prompting the airport operators to cut off connections to the systems.
A passenger moaned about the lack of information and "total mess" at the airport. He said the machines weren't working and they couldn't get their boarding passes.
An airport official noted that by late morning, no flights were cancelled over the intrusion, but the situation could change.
Meanwhile, in the Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest, a technical issue affected a service provider for check-in and boarding systems.
A traveller voiced annoyance at the additional time to check in for her flight, saying people "felt really stranded."
She said: "I checked in online the day before departure, but they weren't able to issue the boarding passes, and they told us that we must collect our boarding passes at the check-in desk. And that's when this whole madness started. Because then they said that they had this fault. It's a global fault. They were taking, like, 10 minutes to get one person through."
Elsewhere, Brussels airport said the attack had a "large impact" on flight schedules. Officials there reported that they had four flight diversions and delays on most of the departing flights.
Airlines were asked to cancel half of their scheduled departing flights in Brussels today to avoid late cancellations.
So far, at least 29 flight departures and arrivals had been cancelled at Heathrow, Berlin and Brussels.
Many other European airports said their operations were unaffected.
The co-founder of a cybersecurity consultancy pointed to vulnerabilities in the security systems.
He said: "So that there was so much dependency here across so many airports on one particular operating system, seemingly without backups. What we're actually now seeing in real time is a resilience drill."
Experts suspected that hackers, criminal organisations or state actors might be behind the alleged attack, with some saying it looked more like vandalism than extortion.
British and German cyber defence authorities have stepped in to contact respective airports over the matter.
