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Hrmbee OP t1_j8nvdqh wrote

>Lufthansa confirmed the cause of the outage in an email to Gizmodo, saying “During construction work in Frankfurt, fiber optic cables belonging to a telecommunications service provider were damaged.” The company said on its website that all Frankfurt flights were suspended while some flights in and out of Munich were also canceled and recommended that passengers should not travel to the airport. > >Deutsche Telekom spokesman Peter Kespohl told Bloomberg that Telekom had repaired two cables thus far and is working to repair the others but did not specify how long the process would take. > >Lufthansa said in its email that it “expects the situation to ease further over the next few hours” and expects its flight operations to largely resume and be back on schedule on Thursday. The company added that passengers who booked “domestic flights can switch to Deutsche Bahn until Sunday.”

It's amazing that in 2023 a major airline at a major international airport doesn't have redundant service to keep things running in case of an outage. Given the IT challenges observed of late by several airlines though, perhaps this is more of an industry wide issue, and one that requires a shift in attitude by the industry as a whole.

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LocoCoyote t1_j8nztxn wrote

> It’s amazing that in 2023 a major airline at a major international airport doesn’t have redundant service to keep things running in case of an outage.

They did…it was that second cable.

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carlinhush t1_j8oirzq wrote

That's exactly what I thought. Redundant systems and everything but sometimes it hits the one place they're vulnerable - where both cables run in one trench

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Hrmbee OP t1_j8ojqup wrote

Yeah, if they're in the same trench/conduit then that certainly presents additional challenges. For sites that are subject to frequent construction and/or maintenance activities such as airports, it would be prudent to have at least one backup that is using a different physical route. In some facilities that I'm familiar with, they've gone with wireless systems (microwave, satellite, etc) as a backup in case the physical link goes down.

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LocoCoyote t1_j8nzl39 wrote

Hans on the construction crew was quoted as saying “oops”

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BravoCharlie1310 t1_j8og38r wrote

It’s always that early morning hungover backhoe operator that causes the most havoc.

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concealed_cat t1_j8pfvsl wrote

I am surprised that this was possible to happen in Germany, let alone that it actually did...

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E_Snap t1_j8ssuap wrote

What happens behind the scenes when shit hits the fan on this scale for a company as big as Lufthansa?

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