In order to demand better pay, workers at eight German airports have gone on strike, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers.
In response to the Verdi trade union’s call for a full-day strike, Germany’s largest airline, Lufthansa, canceled more than 1,300 flights at its two busiest hubs, Frankfurt and Munich, on Friday.
Airports in the cities of Bremen, Dortmund, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, and Stuttgart are among the others that are impacted.
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According to Verdi, the action was expected to have “a strong impact, especially on domestic air traffic, ranging from delays to cancellations and even a partial shutdown of air traffic.”
According to the German airport association ADV, the strike will impact over 2,300 flights and about 295,000 passengers overall.
The strike coincides with a series of concurrent strikes of a similar nature taking place throughout Europe, which is coping with a sharp decline in living standards brought on by high energy prices.
Workers in the public sector, airport ground staff, and aviation security personnel are calling for higher pay at a time when the rising cost of living is eroding their incomes.
Airports in Frankfurt and Hamburg advised travelers not to travel to the airport at all. It was suggested that people who were traveling within Germany switch to train trips. All of the airport’s scheduled passenger flights were canceled.
The strike brings to an end a chaotic week for German air travel. A day after a major IT failure at Lufthansa left thousands of passengers stranded, several German airport websites on Thursday had their services interrupted by a suspected cyber-attack.
Cyberattacks also targeted airports in Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, and Erfurt-Weimar. Either the websites couldn’t be accessed or they displayed error messages.
Airports were the target of significant DDoS attacks again at another time, according to a statement from Ralph Beisel, CEO of the ADV airport association.
High volumes of internet traffic are diverted to specific servers during a DDoS or denial-of-service attack in order to take the targets offline.
More than 200 flights were canceled on Wednesday due to computer system failure brought on by cable damage at a construction site at Frankfurt Airport.
Russian hackers, according to the German news source Der Spiegel, were claimed to have been responsible for the attack.
