German airline Lufthansa suffered a major IT outage on Wednesday which led to thousands of passengers being left stranded.

In total, more than 200 flights were cancelled from the vital Frankfurt transit hub, with further flights forced to be diverted. All Lufthansa airlines were affected, including SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings.

The company, which confirmed its systems were up and running again on Thursday, blamed the outage on botched railway engineering works which damaged broadband cables. The airline and Germany's national train operator Deutsche Bahn confirmed that third-party engineers carrying out works on a railway line extension drilled through a Deutsche Telekom fibre optic cable bundle on Tuesday night.

The outage caused passenger check-in and boarding systems to break, with German air traffic control suspending incoming flights.

While Frankfurt, Europe’s second-busiest airport, was the most impacted, Paris Charles de Gaulle said that two flights had been cancelled with an additional two made to turn back around. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport reported one cancellation of a flight to Frankfurt.

While all parties involved confirmed this incident was an accidental fault of engineers, unknown attackers cut cables belonging to Deutsche Bahn in December as an act of sabotage against the railway leading some to initially suspect foul play.

Elsewhere, Scandinavian airline SAS said that it was the subject of a cyber attack on Tuesday evening. The hack, now resolved, leaked customer information from its app and froze its website. This was one of several recent cyber attacks on Swedish companies, including public television broadcaster SVT which was temporarily shut down.

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