All flights to one of the busiest airports in Europe have been grounded after a security issue took air traffic control offline.
The issue plaguing the Netherlands’ Eindhoven Airport, which saw 6.8 million passengers last year, isn’t expected to be resolved until this afternoon.
No flights have been able to take off or land all day.
The airport said in a statement on X: ‘In any case, there will be no air traffic possible at Eindhoven Airport until 5pm. For current flight information, keep an eye on the Eindhoven Airport website or contact your airline.’
Local media Omroep Brabant reported the hall is crowded with travellers complaining they have received very little information about what is happening and when it will be resolved.
One person said: ‘We haven’t been told what’s going on for a few hours.’
Airlines operating flights to and from the southern Dutch city include Ryanair, Transavia and Wizz Air.
It comes as the country’s emergency services have also been hit with communication issues, with civil servants locked out of their computers and police and firefighters forced to communicate via phone and text message since last night.
The problems are thought to be caused by a problem at the Dutch ministry of defence which caused major IT failures across the country.
The extent and the cause of the problems are not yet known.
Spokesperson Laurens Bos said: ‘We are experiencing an outage in one of our networks at the defence department and it is a network that is also used by other parts of the Dutch government.’
The National Cybersecurity Centre said it is not yet known if the outage is a result of a cyber attack.
Eindhoven airport also serves as a military airport operated by the Dutch ministry of defence. The country’s largest airport, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, has not reported any problems.
Spokesperson Judith de Roy said: ‘There is no air traffic at all and we have very little information about the cause.’
Some passengers from Eindhoven were bussed to Brussels Airport, 100 miles south in Belgium.
Hospitals, the country’s tax office and the national emergency number 112 were not reporting problems.
Telecom company KPN was also experiencing a major outage with its mobile service, but the company said it was not clear if the problem was related to the issues at the defence ministry.
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