Airlines Operations Resume After IT Outage

Mumbai, Jul 20 (PTI) Airlines operations across airports, which were impacted due to a global IT outage on Friday, returned to normalcy on Saturday with all services from ticket bookings to reservations and issuing of boarding passes going back completely to the online mode, sources said.

Earlier in the day, Union Minister for Civil Aviation K Ram Mohan Naidu said that the airline systems have started working normally, and all issues were likely to be resolved by noon on Saturday.

“All operations are back to normal. All our services including bookings and reservations are online since Friday late evening,” said an airline executive.

“System is restored and there is no disruption in our services. It is getting back to normalcy,” said a senior executive from a budget airline.

Nevertheless, as many as six to eight flights in the domestic sector were cancelled at Chennai Airport on Saturday, airport authorities said.

"About six flights in the domestic sector, including those airlines operating in Coimbatore, Kolkata, Kochi, Pune were cancelled by some airlines on Saturday. On the international route, there were no cancellations and some airlines reported a delay in the departure and arrival," an official said.

On Friday, in one of the biggest-ever IT outages, an update of a product offered by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered problems with Microsoft's Windows across the planet, hitting operations at financial sector companies and airlines while hospital operations got postponed and some television channels went off air.

Airports across the country witnessed chaotic scenes after the online passenger booking, reservation and boarding systems turned to manual mode due to the outage, resulting in higher passenger handling processing time and consequently hundreds of flights were delayed and many cancelled.

"Since 3 AM (Saturday), airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now," Naidu said in a statement.

There is a backlog because of disruptions on Friday, and it is getting cleared gradually, the minister said and added that the ministry was constantly monitoring the operations at airports and airlines to ensure travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of.

Air India said its own, resilient IT infrastructure remained unaffected on Friday and continues to function as normal.

“We confirm that none of Air India flights on 19 July was cancelled on account of the worldwide outage of travel systems, though there were some delays due to the impact of the outage on airport services.

The reservation and check-in systems of most of the airlines, including IndiGo, SpiceJet, Akasa and Air India Express, are now operational, sources had said earlier in the day. "I am going to Ahmedabad. Online printing (Digi Yatra) is convenient, which wasn't happening yesterday. Everything's fine today. Flights are on time. What happened yesterday was a network issue. No one can do anything about that," said a passenger at Delhi Airport.

"The global outage that led to operational difficulties is nearly resolved, and our teams have made significant progress in restoring normal operations. However, customers may still experience delays and schedule disruptions over the weekend," budget carrier IndiGo said.

IndiGo, the largest airline by domestic market share, operating over 2,000 daily flights, had to cancel around 200 flights due to the Microsoft outage issue.

Two other carriers SpiceJet and Akasa Air said late Friday evening that all their systems at airports, including ticket bookings, were up and running.

SpiceJet said that "all its systems at airports, ticket bookings and call centres are up and running smoothly after a successful resolution of a Microsoft outage that impacted the aviation industry all through the day".

"While the global systems downtime of reservations, check-in and boarding systems posed an unprecedented operational challenge to our ground services team, Akasa Air confirms that all its scheduled flights on Friday operated with minimum disruptions and nil cancellations," the airline said.