Swiss airspace “is closed until further notice” due to a computer failure, the air traffic control service Skyguide announced in a statement on Wednesday, without specifying the origin of the failure.
“A technical breakdown occurred at Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control service, in the early hours of the morning, which is why Swiss airspace was closed to traffic for safety reasons,” the statement said. from Skyguide.
The company gave no explanation of the reasons for the outage, stating only that “this closure of airspace applies until further notice” and stressing that the company “deplores this incident and its consequences for its customers, partners and passengers of Geneva and Zurich airports and is working hard to find a solution”.
suspend your flight
Geneva Cointrin International Airport said in a tweet that “all take-offs and landings at Genève Aéroport are suspended until 11 a.m.” (9 a.m. GMT).
A spokeswoman for Zurich Airport, the other major air hub in the Alpine country, said the airport remained open despite the outage.
According to the ATS-Keystone agency, international flights to Switzerland have been diverted to, in particular, Milan airport in northern Italy.
The Zurich airport website shows that United Airlines flight UA134 from New York was diverted to Frankfurt airport in western Germany, while Singapore Airlines flight SQ346 from from the city-state was diverted to southern Germany and Munich airport.
Zurich is the leading airport in Switzerland with more than 10.2 million passengers boarding or passing through its terminals in 2021. With the gradual lifting of health restrictions, traffic has increased sharply since March, approaching the levels of before pandemic.
Traffic rose to 1.3 million passengers in March, then to more than 1.8 million in April and to more than 1.9 million in May at this airport, which raised the number of destinations served to 191 for the summer period. with the recovery of tourism.
In Geneva, just over 5.9 million passengers had traveled through this airport, while air traffic was like in Zurich still severely affected by health restrictions. But since March, traffic has picked up sharply, once again surpassing the one million passenger mark per month.
With the resumption of tourism, In May, 1.14 million passengers used this airport, according to provisional statistics from Geneva airport.