There was airport travel chaos in some airports in Germany today after a police IT malfunction left people coming in from outside the Schengen area stranded in queues
German airports were plunged into chaos today (January 3) due to a police IT outage that left people in long queues and some having to wait in planes
The outage prevented people going through passport control from flights from outside the Schengen area, leaving people experiencing major delays. There are 29 members of Schengen, which allows people to travel without border checks except for special circumstances, but the UK is not one of them.
There was significant disruption at Düsseldorf Airport from when the problem started at around 1pm local time. Some passengers were reported to have had to wait for around two hours, while the German news website WDR said some people had to wait on the plane they had flown in on.
A spokesperson for the airport posted on X earlier today: “Currently, there are nationwide disruptions in border control for flights to and from non-Schengen areas in Germany. As a result, delays may occur during both entry and exit. EU destinations and other Schengen Area member states are not affected. The cause is a nationwide IT malfunction at the Federal Police. We regret the inconvenience and kindly ask you to check the status of your flight with your airline or travel operator.”
Federal police responsible for Frankfurt airport told the popular German news outlet BILD: “Our colleagues have to do a lot of things manually that the system used to do. We’re still managing to get it done.”
The cause of the problem is unclear.
There were also queues at Munich Airport, but these were described as minor delays.
In Berlin, an airport spokesperson said: “Here, it takes a little longer to enter the country. But there is no entry ban.”
Hamburg Airport said: “We have no queues here and the outage currently has no impact on air traffic .”
Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the Federal Police Union has blamed a lack of investment on IT for the outage. He told German newspaper BILD: “It was only a matter of time before something like today happened. It is now a threat to the entire European Schengen system.”
He told how for three years, the authority has lacked the money to modernize its IT infrastructure. “We have already warned the Federal Ministry of the Interior about this many times, but Ms. Faeser has always consistently ignored it,” he stated. “This is an absolutely home-made problem of the Federal Minister of the Interior and chaos waiting to happen!”
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