Travellers from outside of the Schengen zone including the UK are facing major delays at German airports due to an IT outage.
The outage has affected federal police systems used to check incoming passengers with the cause not yet known. It has meant that for some passengers they have had to wait several hours to enter and at Dusseldorf there are reports that it is not possible to pass immigration control at the moment.
“Our colleagues have to do a lot of things manually that the system used to do. We’re still managing to get it done at the moment,” said a police spokesperson responsible for Frankfurt airport, Germany’s busiest.
There are also long long queues in the security area of Düsseldorf Airport where some passengers had been waiting for two hours. The airport told local media that it was currently not possible to enter Germany from outside the Schengen area.
But currently at Munich Airport there are no long queues, said a Federal Police spokesperson although there are minor delays which is a similar situation to what is happening Berlin and Hamburg airports. A spokesperson for Berlin Airport said: “Here, it takes a little longer to enter the country. But there is no entry ban.”
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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