German Airports Suffer Website Outage, Hacker Attack Suspected: Report

Websites of several airports in Germany were reportedly disrupted on Thursday.

The landing strip at Dortmund airport (Image: AFP)

Websites of several airports in Germany were reportedly disrupted on Thursday. News agency Reuters quoted German magazine Focus's website, which said that a hacker attack was suspected behind the disruption. 

Focus reported that Nuremberg Airport suspected a hacker attack caused the site to receive so many inquiries that it collapsed. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf and Dortmund were temporarily affected. The Erfurt-Weimar Airport website has been shut down. 

The Nuremberg airport's website was not accessible on Thursday evening.

The Internet providers are checking whether it was a hacker attack, said a spokesperson.  "It is unlikely that the outage was caused by a regular overload. There is reason to suspect it could be a hacker attack," the spokesperson was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Impact on air traffic due to the outages as a whole is not known at present. The respective airport authorities are working to get the websites back online.

According to Spiegel Online, the outage could have been caused by 'hacktivists' through a DDoS attack. A DDoS or distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

Earlier, an IT setup failure had left thousands stranded at Germany's busiest airport in Frankfurt. The IT failure resulted in the cancellation of more than 200 flights in Frankfurt, which is an important international transit hub and one of Europe's biggest airports.

More disruptions at German airports are likely as the country's trade union Verdi has planned a strike on Friday. The Frankfurt airport authorities warned of "massive disruptions" in view of the planned strikes. Verdi on Wednesday urged all workers at the airports in Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Dortmund, Hanover, and Bremen to observe a day-long strike.