Under the Fluorescent Lights: A Morning at Dublin Airport’s Terminal 2
There is a particular hum to airports in autumn mornings—the hiss of coffee machines, the squeak of trolley wheels, the low murmur of announcements over tannoy systems. This morning, that familiar soundtrack was punctured by something more unsettling: the slow, bureaucratic shuffle of humans filling the gaps left by failing machines.
At Terminal 2, families clustered around paper-laden counters as airline staff scrawled boarding passes by hand and stamped luggage tags with the kind of focus usually reserved for intricate handiwork. “We’ve been doing what we can,” said Siobhán Murphy, a check-in agent who has worked at Dublin Airport for seven years. “When the screens go dark, the real work starts. You see people breathe out, or sometimes, they get quiet—there’s an anxiety in not knowing if you’ll make your flight.”
Dublin Airport confirmed it was supporting carriers as they navigated what it called a “Europe-wide technical issue” that has disrupted check-in and baggage-drop processes in multiple terminals. A spokesperson urged passengers to allow additional time, noting that while the airport expected to operate a full schedule, the check-in experience would be slower than usual.
From Heathrow to Brussels: A Domino of Delays
This wasn’t an isolated hiccup. Airports across Europe—London’s Heathrow, Brussels Airport, Berlin’s airports—reported similar slowdowns. At Heathrow’s Terminal 4, travellers faced long queues and nervous uncertainty, while British Airways’ operations at Terminal 5 remained largely unaffected, underscoring how the disruption was selective, but still pervasive.
“We’re operating manual workarounds wherever possible,” Graeme McQueen, speaking for Dublin Airport, told passengers. “Some airlines are continuing to use manual workarounds to generate bag tags and boarding passes. This means that the check-in and bag drop processes may take slightly longer than normal.”
Brussels Airport was more blunt: it said there had been “a cyber attack” on the service provider for check-in and boarding systems and warned of continued cancellations and delays. Berlin’s airport authority reported extended waits at check-in counters as well.
The Weak Link: A Vendor’s Software and Its Ripple Effects
At the center of the disruption is Muse—Collins Aerospace’s multi-user system environment that handles electronic check-in and baggage drop for several airlines worldwide. Collins Aerospace confirmed a “cyber-related disruption” to the Muse software in select airports and said teams were working to restore full functionality.
“The impact is limited to electronic customer check-in and baggage drop and can be mitigated with manual check-in operations,” the company’s statement read. In practice, mitigation meant more manpower, longer lines, and paper replacing pixels.
It’s a sharp reminder of how modern travel runs on a patchwork of third-party services. When one supplier’s system goes offline, the consequences cascade—boarding times stretch out, staff scramble, flights are missed, and the ripple reaches into hotels, rental cars, and schedules that depend on the timely arrival of aircraft and passengers.
People in the Queue: Stories Behind the Delays
There is a story at every folding table where agents are printing paper boarding cards. Javier, a software engineer bound for a client meeting, held his toddler on his hip while collecting a manually issued bag tag. “I told my manager to push the meeting back,” he laughed, a brittle sound. “There is a strange solidarity here—strangers offering to hold each other’s place in line, parents sharing snacks.”
A flight attendant who asked to be named only as Maria described the strain on staff. “We train for emergencies, not for paperwork marathons,” she said. “By midday, people are tired. Our guests ask good questions. We try to answer them. That’s all you can do.”
For some travelers, the delay was catastrophic. A bride’s mother missed a connecting flight to a wedding in Berlin. An elderly couple, travelling to reunite with grandchildren, felt the worry of lost time acutely. For others, the inconvenience was a story to tell: “I always thought airports were efficient machines. Today I saw the seams,” said a Zurich-bound passenger.
What Officials and Experts Are Saying
European institutions moved quickly to monitor the situation. The European Commission said it was keeping close watch, working with EUROCONTROL, ENISA (the EU Agency for Cybersecurity), airlines and airports. A spokesperson noted that aviation safety and air traffic control were not affected—reassuring news for systems that guide planes in the sky—but stressed that operational disruption on the ground could still be significant.
Cybersecurity experts see this incident as another symptom of an increasingly connected, and therefore increasingly fragile, aviation ecosystem. “Attack surfaces have multiplied as the industry digitizes,” said Dr. Lukas Weber, a cybersecurity researcher at a Berlin technical university. “Ground systems—check-in, bag drops, even ground handling—are all part of a supply chain. An incident at a single supplier can become a continental story overnight.”
ENISA’s reports have long warned of rising incidents targeting critical infrastructure, and the aviation sector sits high on that list: a blend of safety-critical operations, complex logistics, and high public visibility. Though regulators say this disruption shows no signs of being “widespread or severe,” the episode exposes vulnerabilities that airports and airlines can ill afford to ignore.
Numbers That Matter
So far, the immediate toll includes dozens of disrupted flights across multiple terminals, with at least 14 cancellations reported in London’s affected terminals during the initial day of the outage. While the scales of delay differ by airport and airline, one constant has been passenger inconvenience—ranging from a short wait to a missed event or connecting flight.
Practical Steps: What Travelers Can Do
For readers with trips on the horizon, here are simple, practical tips—born of airport experience and the hard lessons of disrupted itineraries.
- Contact your airline before you travel. Status can change hour by hour.
- Allow extra time for check-in—plan to arrive earlier than usual if possible.
- Pack essentials in carry-on: medication, documents, a change of clothes.
- Have digital and physical copies of your itinerary and travel documents.
- Be patient and polite—airline and airport staff are working harder than it looks.
Beyond One Incident: A Moment to Reflect
Air travel has been remodeled by the digital revolution. Mobile boarding passes, automated kiosks, real-time bag tracking—these innovations have made travel faster and more convenient. But convenience carries trade-offs. We’ve traded redundancy for efficiency; centralized systems save money, and when they fail, the failure is felt farther and wider.
Do we accept that a single software outage can ripple across a continent? Or is now the time to demand more resilient architectures—diverse suppliers, robust offline processes, and contingency funding to keep people moving when systems fail? Policy-makers, airlines and airports will need to answer these questions. So too will passengers, who may have to decide how much buffer they’re willing to build into their travel plans.
Closing Thoughts: Small Acts of Kindness in a Papered World
The image that stays with me is small and human: an exhausted agent pressing a paper tag into a traveler’s hand, a dad balancing a carry-on and a toddler, a stranger offering a smile and a place in line. Technology failed today—but those human moments did not. For all the talk of systems and security, airports remain, at their beating heart, gatherings of people.
Will the industry learn from this? Will it build the redundancies that mirror the complexity of global travel? For now, travelers must be nimble; airports must be ready to revert to analogue; and we, as a society, must reckon with how deeply we want to bind our skies to code. Next time you stand in line under the fluorescent lights, look around. You’re witnessing the fragile choreography of a modern world—beautiful when it works, urgent when it doesn’t.
