Hundreds of thousands of passengers at Heathrow and Berlin airports faced flight delays on Sunday after a cyber-attack hit check-in desk software, while cancellations at Brussels airport suggested that disruption of Europe’s air travel would continue into Monday.
Airlines were forced to revert to slower manual check-ins from Friday night after the attack hit Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in desk technology to various airlines.
Brussels airport asked airlines on Sunday afternoon to cancel half of the departing flights scheduled for Monday. The airport said Collins was “not yet able to deliver a new secure version of the check-in system”, and confirmed a cyber-attack had taken place.
Airports urged passengers to check the status of their flights before travelling and asked them to arrive no earlier than three hours before long-haul flights and two hours before shorter journeys.
Collins said on Saturday it was dealing with a “cyber-related incident”. The hack joins a long line of attacks that have hit big companies in recent months. The UK’s largest automotive employer, Jaguar Land Rover, has been unable to produce any cars for three weeks because of a hack, while the British retailers Marks & Spencer and the Co-op were also hit by separate attacks earlier this year.
Airlines were still able to check in passengers manually.
At Heathrow 90% of more than 350 flights had been delayed by 15 minutes or more, while six were cancelled by 3pm on Sunday afternoon, according to the data company Flightradar24. The average delay was 34 minutes. Thirteen flights were cancelled on Saturday, although the vast majority of hundreds of flights were delayed.
A Heathrow spokesperson said the “underlying problem was outside our influence” but added that the airport had brought in extra staff to help cope with any disruption. It is understood that Heathrow has not mandated any cancellations for Monday, and the majority of flights are expected to be operating.
“Work continues to resolve and recover from Friday’s outage of a Collins Aerospace airline system that impacted check-in,” Heathrow said in a statement. “We apologise to those who have faced delays, but by working together with airlines, the vast majority of flights have continued to operate.”
In Brussels 86% of flights by 3pm on Sunday had been delayed at the airport at Zaventem, one of two serving the Belgian capital. Delays ranged from 15 minutes to four hours.
The airport said 15% of its scheduled flights would be cancelled overall this weekend. It cancelled 25 departures out of 234 on Saturday, and 50 out of 257 on Sunday “in order to avoid long queues and late cancellations”, a spokesperson said.
In Berlin 73% of about 200 flights were delayed. “Due to a systems outage at a service provider, there are longer waiting times,” Berlin airport said on its website. “Please use online check-in, self-service check-in and the fast bag drop service.”
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Dublin airport also said it was affected by the attack, with the majority of flights from the Irish capital delayed.
On Saturday, Collins Aerospace said “cyber-related disruption” had affected its Muse software used for electronic customer check-in and baggage drop.
Collins is owned by the New York-listed RTX, one of the world’s largest aerospace and weapons conglomerates. The company said it was “actively working to resolve the issue and restore full functionality to our customers as quickly as possible”.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with Collins, UK airports and British law enforcement to assess the impact of the incident.