Over the weekend, a cyber-incident affecting Collins Aerospace’s Muse system disrupted check-in, boarding and baggage drop operations at major European airports - including Heathrow, Brussels, Berlin, and Dublin. Delays and cancellations followed, as staff reverted to manual processing. Initial reports point to a third-party service provider as the source of the issue, underlining just how dependent essential services are on external platforms. When one vendor is hit, disruption can ripple across multiple airports and borders. For critical infrastructure, the lesson is clear: incident-response planning must go beyond internal systems to include supplier risk, fallback processes and manual alternatives - or the effects of system outages can spread far and fast.
