Russian flag carrier Aeroflot has been hit by a massive cyberattack that has affected key operational systems, grounding a slew of flights and leaving thousands of passengers stranded.
Two pro-Ukrainian hacker groups have claimed responsibility for the attack, which was reportedly a year in the making and has resulted in thousands of the airline’s computer servers being taken offline.
In a statement, Aeroflot confirmed it had suffered an IT systems failure without attributing a cause for the outage. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has, however, confirmed the systems are linked to an ongoing cyberattack.
Russia’s official TASS news agency reported that the airline had ordered stranded passengers to leave Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport after the terminal buildings started to become dangerously overcrowded because so many flights were canceled with little notice.
The attack is believed to have taken place overnight on July 27 into July 28, with some reports suggesting Aeroflot even cut power to its headquarters building in a desperate bid to stop the cyberattack.
Aeroflot is currently unable to rebook passengers or issue refunds, while a limited number of flights are operating on the back of manual processes.
The airline said it was prioritizing flights for transporting Russian troops involved in the war in Ukraine, as well as special category passengers, including people with disabilities and families with young children.
The cyberattack is the latest mass disruption to Russia’s aviation industry this summer, after mass drone attacks forced regulators to shutter huge swathes of airspace across the country.
Earlier this month, 485 flights across Russia were canceled over just one weekend, and thousands more were delayed, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded in overcrowded airports that struggled to cope with the disruption.
The mass cancellations and delays resulted from sweeping and short-notice airspace closures imposed by Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency. Officials euphemistically blamed the chaos on “external disruptions.”
Sources linked to Ukraine have, however, explained that those disruptions were caused by drone attacks deep into Russian territory.
In the aftermath of the weekend flight mayhem, President Putin sacked his transport minister, Roman Starovoit. Just hours after being sacked, Starovoit was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head and a pistol lying by his body in a park on the outskirts of Moscow.
