German airports were on Friday, hit by a nationwide IT outage affecting police systems at border control. This ultimately led to flight disruptions and longer immigration queues for passengers from outside the European Union’s Schengen travel zone.
“There is currently a nationwide IT disruption,” a federal police spokesperson had told news reporters by phone, forcing officers to manually process passengers coming in from outside the passport-free Schengen area.
At the time of filing this report, the cause of the outage has not been immediately determined but the incident kept queues of people waiting at border control at several German airports, including Frankfurt, the country’s busiest one.
Berlin airport had also confirmed longer waiting times at immigration for non-Schengen passengers.
A spokesperson for Duesseldorf airport had said;
“We can confirm that since around 2 p.m. (1300 GMT) today, there have been disruptions to border control for flights to and from the non-Schengen area,” adding that passengers were being provided with water.
