European Airports Disrupted by Collins Aerospace Cyber Attack: What Engineers Need to Know

On the morning of 20 September 2025, passengers arriving at some of Europe’s busiest airports were greeted with chaos: check-in kiosks offline, baggage drop machines frozen, and staff frantically scribbling boarding passes by hand. The culprit was not a power failure or a staffing shortage, but something far more modern: a cyber-related outage at Collins Aerospace, the company that supplies the MUSE passenger processing system used across multiple hubs.

While travelers lined up in snaking queues at London Heathrow, Brussels Zaventem, and Berlin Brandenburg, security engineers and IT staff were asking a different question: how could a single vendor outage ripple through so many airports at once? And more importantly, what exactly happened behind the scenes?

European Airports Disrupted by Collins Aerospace Cyber Attack: What Engineers Need to Know

📢 This is a developing story. As forensic details emerge (IOCs, attribution, root cause), we’ll update with technical breakdowns. For now, engineers should treat this as a live case study in supply-chain risk and resilience engineering.

What We Know So Far

Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of RTX, confirmed that its MUSE (Multi-User System Environment) platform was disrupted overnight between Friday and Saturday. MUSE is the invisible backbone of modern airports, handling the mundane but essential functions of air travel: printing boarding passes, tagging luggage, running automated bag-drop kiosks, and coordinating with airline systems. When MUSE faltered, so did the entire passenger flow.

By Saturday morning, the fallout was visible. Brussels Airport reported nine cancellations, four diversions, and more than a dozen significant delays before noon. London Heathrow managed to keep flights running but warned of long queues and advised passengers to check with their airlines before heading out. Berlin Brandenburg experienced similar slowdowns. Other hubs, including Frankfurt and Paris Charles de Gaulle, were untouched, either because they rely on different providers or had alternative systems in place.

Airports scrambled to switch to manual operations. Staff who normally troubleshoot kiosk errors were suddenly back to basics: checking IDs, printing passes on stand-alone machines, and hand-tagging baggage. It worked, barely, but the queues and cancellations made clear how fragile the digital infrastructure of modern aviation can be.

The Missing Technical Details

So far, Collins Aerospace has used careful wording: a “cyber-related disruption.” That phrase suggests the issue was not a simple hardware failure or accidental outage, but the company has stopped short of calling it an attack. No malware family has been named, no hashes or indicators of compromise have been released, and no group has stepped forward to claim responsibility.

This leaves the engineering community in an uncomfortable place: knowing something serious happened, but lacking the forensic breadcrumbs that usually guide response. We don’t yet know whether the disruption was caused by ransomware, a zero-day exploit, stolen credentials, or even a supply-chain compromise. We don’t know whether any passenger data was accessed, or if the attackers were motivated by profit, sabotage, or geopolitics.

What we do know is that the blast radius was limited to electronic check-in and baggage systems. Air traffic control, flight operations, and security screening were unaffected. That containment is important, but it also raises questions about how isolated or segmented MUSE really is from other systems.

Lessons for Engineers and Security Teams

Even without confirmed technical details, the Collins Aerospace incident holds important lessons for anyone building or securing complex systems.

First, shared dependencies can be dangerous. When one vendor provides software used across dozens of airports, an outage at that vendor becomes a systemic risk. Engineers often talk about “single points of failure” inside a system, but in today’s interconnected world, the real points of failure may be hiding in your vendor list.

Second, resilience is more than backups. Airports that had strong manual fallback processes [like Heathrow] were able to keep passengers moving, albeit slowly. Others struggled. The takeaway for software engineers is that resilience isn’t just about redundant servers or cloud failover. It’s about graceful degradation: designing workflows that still function when automation disappears.

Third, identity remains a prime target. In recent months, attackers like the group known as Scattered Spider have specialized in breaching organizations by exploiting helpdesk procedures, resetting MFA devices, and hijacking single sign-on sessions. If MUSE or its administrators were compromised this way, it would fit a familiar pattern. For defenders, this reinforces the need to harden identity systems and monitor for anomalies in account recovery processes.

Fourth, observability is everything. The fact that neither Collins nor government agencies can yet explain what happened suggests gaps in monitoring and logging. For engineers, this is a reminder: if your system went down tonight, could you distinguish between a bug, a misconfiguration, or a hostile intrusion? If not, your incident response will be guesswork.

What Comes Next

The coming days will bring more answers. National cyber agencies such as the UK’s NCSC and Germany’s BSI are already involved, and Europe’s CERT community will likely publish indicators of compromise once investigators confirm them. Security vendors like CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and SentinelOne may eventually attribute the incident to a known actor, whether criminal or state-aligned.

Airlines and passengers will want to know if personal data was exposed. Regulators will ask hard questions about why so many airports depend on a single system with limited redundancy. And software engineers everywhere should be paying attention to how quickly Collins is able to restore MUSE and what safeguards it puts in place to prevent a repeat.

A Wake-Up Call

For travelers, this weekend’s disruption was an inconvenience. For airlines, it was a logistical headache. But for engineers and security professionals, it should be a wake-up call. Critical infrastructure today is not just runways and control towers; it is also the software platforms humming quietly in the background. When those systems falter, planes don’t leave the ground.

The Collins Aerospace incident is a reminder that resilience, redundancy, and visibility are not optional extras. They are the foundation of trust in digital systems. Whether you’re building a payment platform, a healthcare application, or an airport check-in system, the lesson is the same: design as if your weakest supplier might be your next breach.