Lufthansa Says IT System Issues Are Grounding All Its Flights (bloomberg.com) 53
Deutsche Lufthansa has grounded all of its flights because of company computer issues. From a report: A Lufthansa spokesman said Wednesday the company is urgently investigating the matter. It wasn't immediately clear whether Lufthansa flights that were already airborne were instructed to land. Lufthansa's stable of airlines includes its namesake brand and the national flag-carriers Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Swiss. The company also operates low-cost carrier Eurowings as well as other smaller airlines. In total, the group operates around 700 aircraft, making it Europe's largest airline by fleet size.
Checkin and Boarding (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the problem is with Checkin and Boarding (which is probably one application anyway). Back when people had "real" paper tickets you could do everything by hand, but not any more.
I was at Lufthansa for a few years and there were two major outages in this area, one was in late 2004 and caused minimal disruption, the second was a few years later and caused havoc.
Nowadays LH have outsourced everything to Amadeus and I'm rather surprised that this problem is only supposed to be affecting LH rather than all of the airlines hosted by Amadeus.
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the printed receipt will stick around
California came close to banning paper receipts in 2022.
The ban failed by only a few votes.
The bill would have allowed paper receipts only if the customer requested one.
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the printed receipt will stick around
California came close to banning paper receipts in 2022.
The ban failed by only a few votes.
The bill would have allowed paper receipts only if the customer requested one.
We'll see if we're still making that same bullshit argument in 2032 and beyond. After all, it's only been 100 years since the paper industry demonized cannabis as a direct competitor, and we know how the war on that plant is still going.
Re: Checkin and Boarding (Score:1)
Everything is a plot get "Muh weed!" Paranoid much? Maybe put the bong down.
Re:Checkin and Boarding (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't see how paper receipts or boarding passes would help if the computer isn't working. They're not just going to look at the piece of paper in your hand and say, "looks good to me!" and let you board the plane without scanning it to see if it checks out.
If the computer system is down, you have only two choices: (1) visual inspection of the paper boarding pass or (2) the plane doesn't fly. If there aren't paper boarding passes, you can either ground your fleet or board anyone who claims to have purchased a ticket. It might make economic and PR sense to fly planes even though you cannot verify that a ticket was purchased.
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No it doesn't. The world's airline systems are completely and inseparably interlinked digitally. This isn't the case of "don't fly plane" or "look at paper ticket".
It's a case of "don't fly plane" or ....
- Board a plane not knowing of its passenger count.
- Board a plane not knowing of its baggage count.
- Potentially stranding transiting passengers.
- Losing track of people's travel status (airlines track where customers do and don't board for the trips).
- Being unable to verify baggage transit with handling
Re:Checkin and Boarding (Score:4, Insightful)
No it doesn't. The world's airline systems are completely and inseparably interlinked digitally. This isn't the case of "don't fly plane" or "look at paper ticket".
It's a case of "don't fly plane" or ....
- Board a plane not knowing of its passenger count.
- Board a plane not knowing of its baggage count.
- Potentially stranding transiting passengers.
- Losing track of people's travel status (airlines track where customers do and don't board for the trips).
- Being unable to verify baggage transit with handling companies.
I have had a flight cancelled before, many times. It took 10min on the phone to resolve. I have boarded a flight without a ticket before (on the instruction of airline staff). It screwed me transiting completely and they didn't let me board the following flight which I had a ticket for, spent 2 hours with customer service, and days to get my baggage which was intentionally not loaded on the plane.
It's easier and cheaper to cancel a flight than to deal with attempting paper boarding.
The airline industry didn't used to be this fragile. In the 1930s everything was done by hand. Perhaps the industry needs a disaster plan which will let them limp along when the computers are down. Hospitals do this.
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They used to have anti-counterfeiting measures. Then they changed to print at home instead of having people mailing passes around and it became trivial to forge passes, so then they had to check them all.
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I don't see how paper receipts or boarding passes would help if the computer isn't working. They're not just going to look at the piece of paper in your hand and say, "looks good to me!" and let you board the plane without scanning it to see if it checks out.
No, they're going to look at the number printed on your paper boarding pass, and check it against the number printed on their paper list (or offline spreadsheet, or whatever)
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Buy one item, get a receipt as long as you are.
I have seen that.
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Some claimed that it's an optical fiber that was damaged during a remodeling somewhere in Frankfurt.
Today a lot of computer systems are interconnected with a lot of cross-dependencies so even though Amadeus has some services they don't have all and some services are provided by the airline.
However this shows the importance of redundancy in the network connections. With a redundancy the stress would just be on the IT department hoping that the secondary link won't fail. Now the stress was a number of magnitu
Paywall, thanks editors (Score:2)
How about a link that isn't just a paywall?
Re:Paywall, thanks editors (Score:4, Informative)
I have a link, but it's in German [hessenschau.de]. German Air Traffic Control are not letting flights land at Frankfurt because there are already too many aircraft on the ground there. Lufthansa have cancelled their flights within Germany for the duration, people have to take the train.
Here's another link in German [tagesschau.de] and it indicates they have found the cause. Some work is being done on the rail system a few miles away and that led to four Glass fibre "cables" being cut by accident yesterday evening. They were not just cut, the hole was then filled with concrete. The four belong to German Telekom (or T-Online, I'm not sure) and it seems Lufthansa are using them.
This explanation feels a bit strange to me, that would place the start of the outage as yesterday and I thought it started today.
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Re:Paywall, thanks editors (Score:4, Funny)
No, but you can take a car.
https://www.google.com/maps/di... [google.com]
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Google giving all the important warnings. No mention of the risk of driving through the middle of Iraq, or along the Turkish / Syrian boarder. But do be sure to check the COVID restrictions as you go. Also this route has tolls.
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Sounds like they need to be introduced to the concept of route diversity for their critical communications...
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Here's a link in English [theguardian.com] and the information there broadly agrees with the content of the German links. What is not explained is why a cable problem in Frankfurt affects - for example - Munich. Lufthansa uses Amadeus for its Checkin systems and Amadeus' computer centre is near Munich.
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Cause: a dipper went through a cable. (Score:5, Informative)
German news magazine "Der Spiegel" just reports (German source) [spiegel.de] that apparently damage done by construction work is the cause and a excavator tore up a dataline.
Re:Cause: a dipper went through a cable. (Score:5, Funny)
All hail the mighty backhoe - destroyer of all communications.
Gaze at his works, oh ye effette pasty keyboard warriors, and weep...
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That's a joke the RF engineers started using when fiber started replacing microwave repeaters for backhaul in the telecomm industry. "Rain fade" is an RF phenomenon that has to be planned for in the RF link power budget. "Backhoe fade" can only be countered by diverse link redundancy.
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I'm more surprised that my workplace didn't suffer since they have a data center in Frankfurt.
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Don't be surprised: there are many datacentres in Frankfurt. Many of them have diverse resilient fibre connections. I used to do a bit of work at one of the financially focused ones and they had their ducks in a row.
Re:Cause: a digger went through a cable. (Score:2)
Seems this digger found a single point of failure.
Excavator alarm (Score:2)
By an excavator working on a rail project hitting data and power lines with one fell swoop.
They thought they'd rely on their insurance instead of paying for people able to read a plan.
Their insurance must be just delighted.
Re: Excavator alarm (Score:4, Funny)
instead of paying for people able to read a plan
No. Call before you dig. Depending on plans is why our tunnel boring machine was damaged and put out of commission for a year. By a test well casing that the tunnel project itself had drilled (and then forgot to show on the plans).
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I don't think power lines were affected - or if they were it was not reported - it was four glass-fibre cables. Just to add to the fun, once they had dug their hole and put whatever they wanted in there, they filled the thing up with concrete.
Something like this happened in Frankfurt around September 2000 but that time Air Traffic Control was affected.
It should not have been a problem - the ATC computer was at the airport and the control tower was also at the airport, they were also on a separate network -
Haha German precision (Score:2)
Haha, turns out the great German engineers and industrialists are just as incompetent as SWA.
Southwest thanks Lufthansa (Score:3)
Finally, something to divert attention away from its own problems!
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Qantas too. After pocketing billions in subsidies during the pandemic, they have completely forgotten how to run an airline.
Probably management failure (Score:2)
According to German media, this is a delayed fallout form a rather large cut in optical cables. My take is it is some synchronization issues where they did not have redundant lines or replacement procedures in place. That would be a failure to put proper BCM measures in place when DR cannot/will not be fast enough.
Probably some bean-counter assigning a wayyy too low probability to an event that he did not understand and no engineer was ever asked. The general problem is also known as "save a penny, lose a m
This is his fault. (Score:2)