After Lufthansa outage, websites of 3 German airports down, hacking suspected

The websites of at least three airports in Germany - Dusseldorf, Nuremberg, and Dortmund - were offline Thursday, a day after an IT systems failure disrupted flight operations of German carrier Lufthansa and left thousands of passengers stranded at the Frankfurt airport. A spokesperson for the Dortmund Airport told news agency Reuters they suspected it was a hacker attack. "We are troubleshooting but it is unlikely failure was due to a regular overload," the spokesperson said.

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German media outlet Spiegel Online said the outage may have been a DDoS attack - in which high volumes of traffic are directed to targeted servers by 'hacktivists' to knock them offline.

On Wednesday, an IT system failure at Lufthansa forced air traffic controllers in Frankfurt to divert or cancel all flights from that airport. Media reports said over 200 flights were grounded.

Incoming planes were diverted to Munich, Nuremberg and Dusseldorf.

A Deutsche Telekom spokesperson later said four broadband fibre cables had been damaged during construction work at a Deutsche Bahn facility. The construction work in question not commissioned or conducted by the company, Bloomberg reported.

Lufthansa resumed flight operations Thursday morning. "Operations have returned to normal for the evening and tomorrow... however, if you are flying on Friday please consider that there are upcoming strikes at the airports in FRA (Frankfurt) and MUC (Munich)," the airline tweeted.