Empty Geofabrik Shapefile data

Question

I downloaded Switzerland OSM data from Geofabrik.de at https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/switzerland.html especially the switzerland-latest-free.shp.zip file.

The MD5 sum corresponds to what's specified (293b013ec4d5574cbe3dad703f18acdf).

But after extracting the files, when I load a Shapefile, e.g. in QGIS, it shows an empty attribute table:

Did I miss something there? Do I need to preprocess the file in some way to make the features visible?

EDIT: same thing happens if I try to load the Shapefile with geopandas:

>>> import geopandas as gpd
>>> gdf = gpd.open('./switzerland-latest-free.shp/gis_osm_pois_a_free_1.shp')

>>> gdf
Empty GeoDataFrame
Columns: [geometry]
Index: []

Answer 1

Many of the shapefiles from that download are empty. The .shp files are 100 bytes long, which is basically just the shapefile header. There are large .shp files in that download but they don't have a .shx file to go with them. They also report zero features with ogrinfo.

I just tried Liechtenstein as a comparison and that looked okay, so something is wrong with Switzerland.

Checked the GeoFabrik twitter account and there's the answer:

https://twitter.com/geofabrik/status/1566763301350014977?s=20&t=s31oYR4bdzOstiYDDYFMkA

"Some of our free shape files on http://download.geofabrik.de were tripped up by the unexpected appearance of https://openstreetmap.org/node/10000000000 (DBF field width for osm_id: 10)... fix being deployed."