A cyberattack on Russian state-owned flagship carrier Aeroflot caused a mass outage to the company’s computer systems on Monday, Russia’s prosecutor’s office said, forcing the airline to cancel more than 100 flights and delay others.
Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and Belarusian hacker activist group the Belarus Cyber-Partisans, which opposes the rule of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.
It is one of the most disruptive cyberattacks to hit Russia since the start of the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Previous attacks have targeted Russian government websites and other major Russian companies — noteably the state-owned Russian Railways — but normal services have resumed within hours.
Images shared on social media showed hundreds of delayed passengers crowding Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where Aeroflot is based. The outage also disrupted flights operated by Aeroflot’s subsidiaries, Rossiya and Pobeda.
While most of the flights affected were domestic, the disruption also led to cancellations for some international flights to Belarus, Armenia and Uzbekistan.
