A major cyberattack against Collins Aerospace’s MUSE common-use check-in/boarding platform triggered widespread disruption across Europe on September 20, 2025, snarling operations at London Heathrow, Berlin Brandenburg, Brussels and other airports. Airlines and airports shifted to manual check-in and baggage drop as electronic kiosks and departure control connections were taken offline, leading to long queues, delays and cancellations. Collins’ parent RTX described the incident as a “cyber-related disruption” to MUSE at select airports. At the same time, officials stressed that the impact was confined to passenger processing systems rather than flight safety systems.
Heathrow called it a “technical issue” at a third-party provider, Berlin reported severing connections to affected handling systems, and Brussels said the outage had a “large impact” on its schedule. By September 21, 2025, airports were restoring services, though knock-on delays persisted, and Brussels Airport even advised cancelling around half of Sunday departures to stabilize operations.
Coverage from European and international outlets noted that the MUSE outage underscored the systemic risk of highly centralized, shared airport IT, where a single vendor incident can ripple across multiple hubs simultaneously. Investigations are underway; authorities and RTX had not publicly attributed the attack or detailed the method as of Sunday, but airports continued contingency procedures while automated systems were brought back online.
Sources: Reuters, BBC, The New York Times, The Business Times
Images: abc7NY, CNN