Lufthansa: IT failure causes cancellations and delays for thousands of passengers

Lufthansa: IT failure causes cancellations and delays for thousands of passengers.

Thousands of air passengers are currently stranded across Europe. An IT fault at Germany's flagship carrier Lufthansa has caused flight delays and disruption on all the airlines they own.

"There is a group-wide IT system failure," a Lufthansa spokesperson told Reuters news agency. Operations are not expected to stabilise until Wednesday evening. 

Photos and videos from several airports across Germany show chaos, with thousands of stranded passengers awaiting news. Passengers reported on social media that the company was having to organise the boarding of planes manually with pen and paper as it couldn't process luggage digitally.

All domestic flights have been cancelled and international flights have also been affected by the outage. 

Lufthansa Group owns Lufthansa as well as six other airlines including Eurowings, Brussels Airlines, and Swiss and Edelweiss Air. 

The airline said it is working intensively to solve the problem.

"Lufthansa asks affected passengers to check the status of their flight on the company’s app or website before arriving at the airport. Passengers with domestic flights can switch to Deutsche Bahn until Sunday," a statement on the airline's website says.