>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.