Air traffic resuming at Eindhoven Airport after IT outage caused hours-long shut down

Air traffic to and from Eindhoven Airport was set to resume late Wednesday afternoon after a computer system failure forced the stoppage of all flight movements there. The problems at the airport were linked to the failure of a secure information technology system developed for the Ministry of Defence and the Dutch military.

Not a single passenger flight took off from, or landed at the airport after a flight from Heraklion, Greece, arrived just before the terminal’s scheduled closing time of 11 p.m. “At Eindhoven Airport, the processes to resume air traffic are being restarted. For current flight information, keep an eye on the website or contact your airline,” the airport announced at 2:15 p.m.

The airport previously said it did not expect operations to begin again “until at least 5 p.m.” Thus far, airlines have cancelled 18 departures, and ten scheduled flights were expected to instead take off from Schiphol, Maastricht, Brussels, or Weeze.

Another 11 arriving flights were cancelled, at least 16 others were diverted to different airports in the region. One Ryanair flight from Reus, near Barcelona, was also inbound towards Eindhoven at the time of the airport’s updated announcement. It was not immediately clear if it would land at Weeze instead.

Many passengers expressed frustration over the lack of communication at the airport. There were indications of problems already late on Tuesday night, but after Eindhoven Airport’s operations had concluded.

However, the problem remained and was expected to affect the start of operations on Wednesday, according to an overnight bulletin from European air traffic control center Eurocontrol. Despite the distribution of that bulletin at about 5:30 a.m., passengers were not told about the problem, nor the scale of it.

“At the counter, they tell us: just wait until something happens,” one person told Omroep Brabant. Several were annoyed that they arrived so early at the airport, but hours later were still not being given firm information from either the airport or several of the airlines.

The airport had about 115 passenger flights scheduled for Wednesday, split almost evenly between departures and arrivals. Even though many had arrived at the airport for a morning flight, the airport first said publicly at 8 a.m. that a ground stop was in effect and that air traffic was “not possible.”

Eventually, some airlines began to cancel flights, announce delays, and shift their flights to other airports.