German airports faced a nationwide IT outage on Friday, affecting police systems at border control and leading to disruption and extended immigration queues for passengers arriving from outside the European Union’s Schengen travel zone.
“There is currently a nationwide IT disruption,” a federal police spokesperson said, explaining that officers were forced to manually process passengers entering from non-Schengen countries, news agency Reuters reported.
The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. The disruption resulted in lengthy queues at border control in several German airports, including Frankfurt, the country’s busiest.
Berlin Airport confirmed longer waiting times for non-Schengen passengers at immigration.
“We can confirm that, since around 2 pm (1300 GMT) today, there have been disruptions to border control for flights to and from the non-Schengen area,” said a spokesperson for Düsseldorf Airport as quoted by Reuters, adding that passengers were being provided with water.
Regional public broadcaster WDR reported that some passengers were waiting up to two hours at immigration, while others were kept aboard their planes.
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