For the second day in a row, London’s Heathrow airport has been affected by a cyber-attach where the electronic check-in and boarding service has been disrupted.
Heathrow Airport is Europe’s busiest airport, handling over 80 million passengers a year
This has been affecting air travelers in several European airports. As a result, there have been hundreds of delays on Saturday after the software system that was used by several airlines failed.
In return, these affected airports had to board their passengers manually using the traditional pen and paper method. In the interim, there have been long lines and queues, and countless flight cancellations and postponements.
Thus far, London’s Heathrow, Berlin’s Brandenburg, and Brussels Airport are the three primary airports that have been affected by the cyberattack that targeted Collins Aerospace’s check-in and boarding systems.
Speaking of Brussels Airport, it has “no indication yet” when their system would be functional again and had asked airlines to cancel half of their departing flights.
This disruption is the latest in a string of hacks targeting governments and companies across the world, hitting sectors from healthcare and defense to retail and autos.
According to the BBC, RTX, which owns software provider Collins Aerospace, noted that it was was “aware of a cyber-related disruption” to its system in “select airports” and stated that it hopes to resolve these issues as quickly as possible.
It subsequently identified its “Muse software,” which allows different airlines to use the same check-in desks, baggage claim, and boarding gates at an airport, rather than requiring their own as the systems had been affected.
The company has yet to disclose what went wrong or how long it expects the outage to last, but stated that it will “provide details as soon as they are available.”
According to Heathrow Airport, efforts are being made to resolve the issue were ongoing.
According to a post on the Heathrow Airport’s X page (formerly known as Twitter), it stated, “Work continues to resolve and recover from Friday’s outage of a Collins Aerospace airline system that impacted check-in.”
“We apologise to those who have faced delays, but by working together with airlines, the vast majority of flights have continued to operate. We encourage passengers to check the status of their flight before travelling to Heathrow and to arrive no earlier than three hours for long-haul flights and two hours for short-haul,” the post expanded.
