LONDON – The German news source Spiegel is reporting that the websites of six German airports have gone off-line this morning, Thursday 16 February. Investigations are currently ongoing with regards to the cause of the outage.
The German news source reports that the websites of airports in Düsseldorf, Hanover, Dortmund, Erfurt, Nuremberg and Baden-Baden have all suffered outages this morning.
Of the six airports affected, Dusseldorf is the largest, and a primary airport for the Rhine-Ruhr region. The airport acts as a hub for Eurowings and Lufthansa, and a focus city for Condor, Corendon Airlines, SunExpress Deutschland and TUI fly Deutschland.
The Spiegel Online report speculates that the outages may have been caused by a form of cyber attack called a “DDoS attack”, however no conclusive finding has yet been formally declared.
DDoS attacks, or Denial of Service attacks, are a method of disruption involving the targetting a computer system by flooding it with messages or connection requests.
Last month it was reported that the websites of key German administrations, including some airports, had been targetted by cyberattacks. According to news source Euronews, the attacks followed the decision by Germany to deploy Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
The outages lasted for approximately an hour duration, with Dusseldorf airport website being restored mid-morning. It appears that there has been no disruption to airport operations or flight scheduling.
This is a continuing story. Please check back for updates.
