Global IT outage causes disruption at Swiss airports

Delays expected: checking the departures board at Zurich airport. Keystone / Gaetan Bally

A worldwide issue affecting Microsoft IT systems had an impact at Swiss airports on Friday, notably in Zurich, where landings were suspended mid-morning. Delays and cancellations were also seen in Geneva and Basel.

For its part, Swiss International Airlines was not directly affected by the glitch caused by a system update by IT security firm Crowdstrike, but problems at partner companies had impacted operations, it told the Keystone-SDA news agency.

By midday, the airline had cancelled two return flights to Berlin, where air traffic had been temporarily severely restricted.

Swiss air traffic control service provider Skyguide meanwhile reduced the capacity of transit traffic over Switzerland by 30% on Friday morning. It also reduced landing approaches to Zurich by the same amount, and at one point the airport temporarily cancelled all landings, before gradually building back up to a normal rhythm in the early afternoon.

All in all, around 100 flights to and from Zurich were cancelled on Friday, the airport said.

Manual check-in

Several airlines also noted delays in Zurich, where check-in had to be done manually in some cases. Passengers were advised to contact their airline for information on flight status.

Geneva Airport reported no direct problems due to the IT outage. However, delays and cancellations were also experienced due to airspace monitoring issues.

At the Swiss-French Basel-Mulhouse airport, ground operations were disrupted as several airlines and service providers struggled with technical problems. According to the airport, there were no major effects on flight handling.

The global service company Swissport meanwhile confirmed that it was severely affected by the breakdown, with most of the baggage handling systems in the country out of action. In the morning, the baggage handler was working with Microsoft to try to solve the problem. Swissport claims to be the world’s largest service company for airlines and airports.

Elsewhere in Switzerland

The Federal Administration said it hadn’t recorded any issues as a result of the breakdown by midday. The Federal Office for Cybersecurity was not aware of any outages, although it had received reports from various companies and critical infrastructures, a spokesperson said.

The systems at the financial services provider PostFinance were running smoothly, it told news agency AWP on Friday morning.

As for telecoms provider Swisscom, it said that the company did not use Crowdstrike services and was thus unaffected “according to current knowledge”. However, it was working to support business customers who use Crowdstrike in resolving problems.

Swiss stock exchange operator SIX said it wasn’t badly affected by the outage either, given that it doesn’t use Crowdstrike.

Adapted from German by DeepL/dos

This article was updated several times on Friday to reflect the ongoing situation.

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