In the early hours of Wednesday morning all flights until 11 a.m. local time had been cancelled at Geneva and Zurich airports for inbound and outgoing flights, causing the cancellation of a number of flights, owing to what appeared to be a hardware problem at the Skyguide air traffic control service.
Skyguide has confirmed that a technical malfunction in the early hours of Wednesday meant that Swiss airspace had to be closed to traffic for “safety reasons”. Images posted by Flightradar24 at 7.17 local time show a massive hole in flights over Switzerland. Skyguide spokesman Vladi Barrosa told the Tagesanzeiger news website that the problem appeared to be a hardware fault and they did not believe their system had been hacked: “Our technicians are working flat out to fix the fault.”
Curiously, flights were running as normal at Basel-Mulhouse airport as despite the city of Basel being in Switzerland, the airport itself is on French territory and is therefore covered by French air traffic control. While as at 10.00 p.m. local time air traffic was gradually resuming, there had been no further details provided regarding flight delays or cancellations.
