Rain, long queues and blinking screens: Dublin’s Terminal 2 in the digital age of fragility
When I pushed through the glass doors of Dublin Airport’s Terminal 2, the first thing that hit me was the ordinary: the smell of fresh coffee, the whoosh of trolleys, the low hum of announcements. The second was the unusual — long lines of people with one foot out the door and their faces turned toward staff holding sheets of paper instead of tablets. It felt like a junction between two eras: the sleek modernity of a one-way-ticket world and the sudden vulnerability of systems on which we have quietly come to depend.
For a second morning, check-in screens stayed dim and automated bag drops were silent. The airport operator, daa, spent the day helping airlines stitch together manual workarounds after a cyber-related outage at a provider of check-in and boarding systems rippled through several European hubs.
Flights grounded, schedules strained
Aer Lingus, one of the carriers most affected, confirmed that 13 flights were cancelled — nine inbound and four outbound — as stressed staff and travelers waited for tags, boarding passes and the kind of human triage that used to be the bread and butter of older terminals.
“Operations have been significantly impacted,” an Aer Lingus communications officer said. “We are working with daa and other partners to minimise disruption and get customers on their way.”
There was some reassurance that this was not a broad grounding order. “Airlines have aircraft where they need to be,” daa said in an evening statement, noting that full schedules were expected to operate even if some processes remained slower than usual. Still, the operator warned passengers to plan extra time, and suggested manual check-ins could again be required for a first wave of departures the following morning.
The human texture of a technical failure
In the queues, conversations folded into the larger narrative. A grandmother from Limerick, clutching a carrier bag of sandwiches and a boarding pass with hand-scrawled details, laughed wryly and said, “You think you have everything organised and then a computer decides otherwise. Keeps you humble.”
A young couple from Madrid, their laptop batteries drained from refreshing flight statuses, compared notes on how their home airlines handled the outage. “At least we’re talking to people now,” one of them said. “It’s noisy, but it feels real.”
A taxi driver waiting outside Terminal 2 summed up the mood with a shrug. “People get anxious, but staff are doing their best. You can’t hate the person at the desk for something happening in a server room elsewhere.”
Across Europe: a chain reaction
This was not an isolated Dublin tale. The same technical problem — linked to Muse, a multi-user system environment used at check-in and bag drop by many airlines — impacted airports in London, Brussels and Berlin, among others. Heathrow, Europe’s busiest hub, urged passengers to confirm flight statuses before leaving for the airport as delays and cancellations were reported and long queues snaked through terminals.
In statements, airports and authorities were measured but frank. Brussels Airport described check-in operations as “heavily disrupted” and warned that the situation could cause a substantive impact on flight schedules. Berlin’s airport website noted longer waiting times at check-in and asked travellers to be patient.
Collins Aerospace, the contractor whose systems were implicated, said it had detected a cyber-related disruption to Muse software at select airports and was working “to resolve the issue and restore full functionality as quickly as possible.” The company added that the disruption was limited to electronic customer check-in and baggage drop and could, to some extent, be mitigated by manual processes.
Expert eyes arrive, but solutions take time
Late in the day, reports circulated that a number of IT specialists from the United States were headed to Dublin to assist with diagnostics and recovery. “When you have networked systems spanning countries and carriers, you bring in every resource you can,” an independent cybersecurity consultant told me. “These are complex environments — the fix is rarely a single keystroke.”
Indeed, daa officials cautioned that while they were hopeful a full technical remedy wasn’t far away, some airlines might need to continue manual workarounds the following morning. The strain on staff and the slower pace at check-in and bag drop were the new normal for the moment.
Why a single outage feels so large
Ask any transportation analyst and they’ll tell you the story is one of concentration and interdependence. Over the last two decades, airlines and airports have outsourced systems, pooled services and leaned on shared platforms to deliver efficiency and economies of scale. That same consolidation, however, creates single points of failure.
“We built a very efficient system but one with limited redundancy,” said a professor of infrastructure resilience at a European university. “When a popular third-party provider goes down, the ripples are disproportionately large.”
That vulnerability is not theoretical. The air transport sector, which handled more than 4.5 billion passengers globally in 2023 according to industry estimates, is increasingly digital. Boarding, baggage tracking, security checks, even aircraft maintenance now rely on connected software. A local IT hiccup can therefore be a continental headache.
Security, supply chains and the politics of outsourcing
There’s also a geopolitical angle. With service providers operating across jurisdictions, an outage prompts rapid questions about where responsibility lies — and who pays the cost. Airports must balance the need for resilient, local fallback systems against the efficiencies of shared, cloud-based platforms. Meanwhile, regulators and governments watch closely; transport resilience is a matter of national economic interest.
“We must be mindful of critical infrastructure,” an EU aviation official commented. “This incident highlights the need for contingency planning and greater transparency among providers.”
What travellers can learn — and how airports might change
So what do you do when a future outage hits while you’re in the middle of travel plans? First, check-flight statuses early and often. Second, arrive with a cushion: more time, charged devices, printed copies if possible. Third, cultivate patience; staff on the frontline are typically doing their best under pressure.
- Check airlines’ live status pages and your booking app frequently.
- Bring printed ID and any necessary documents if you can — they can save time when digital systems are down.
- Allow extra time for check-in and be ready for manual bag tags and boarding arrangements.
For airports and airlines, the lessons are clearer: diversify suppliers, rehearse manual fallbacks and invest in cross-border incident response. For governments, the day’s events are another reminder that the digital and the physical are now inseparable in transport infrastructure.
Beyond the queue: questions to carry home
As you fold this story into the fabric of your own life, ask yourself: how much do we want to centralise convenience at the risk of a single point of failure? Are we prepared to pay more for redundancy, or will we accept occasional, disruptive reminders of our interconnectedness?
At Terminal 2, as the evening settled and screens slowly flickered back to life, the lines shortened. The scent of coffee faded to normal. People collected backpacks and reprieved plans. The airport pulsed again.
But the outage left a quieter, longer question: in a world sped along by algorithms and shared systems, how do we keep the lights on when those systems stumble? The answer will shape travel, commerce and daily life for years to come.
