Earlier in the day, Civil Aviation Minister K Ram Mohan Naidu said the airline’s systems were back to normal and all issues were likely to be resolved by noon on Saturday. | Photo: Freepik
Airlines at airports, which were still suffering from a global IT outage on Friday, resumed normal operations on Saturday, with all services from booking tickets to reservations and issuing boarding passes being fully online, sources said.
Earlier in the day, Civil Aviation Minister K Ram Mohan Naidu had said that the airline’s systems were back to normal 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 late Friday night, an airline executive said.
The system has been restored and there is no disruption in our services. It is getting back to normal, said a senior executive of a budget airline.
However, six to eight domestic flights were cancelled at Chennai airport on Saturday, airport authorities said.
“Around six flights in the domestic sector, including those of airlines operating in Coimbatore, Kolkata, Kochi and Pune, were cancelled by some airlines on Saturday. There were no cancellations on the international route and some airlines reported delays in departures and arrivals,” an official said.
On Friday, an update to a product from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused one of the largest IT outages in history, causing global disruptions to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The disruptions affected financial institutions and airlines, while hospital operations were suspended and some television channels went off the air.
Airports across the country were thrown into chaos after online systems for booking, reserving and boarding passengers were switched to manual mode due to the outage, causing longer processing times and hundreds of flights being delayed and many cancelled.
“Since 3 am (Saturday), aviation systems at all airports have resumed normal operations. Flight operations are now running smoothly,” Naidu said in a statement.
There is a backlog due to the disruptions on Friday, but it is gradually being cleared, the minister said. He added that the ministry is constantly monitoring the situation at airports and airlines to ensure that travel adjustments and refunds are arranged.
Air India said on Friday that its own resilient IT infrastructure remained unaffected and continued to function normally.
We confirm that none of the Air India flights were cancelled on 19 July due to the global travel systems disruption. However, there were some delays due to the impact of the disruption on airport services.
The reservation and check-in systems of most 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 was not happening yesterday. Everything is fine today. Flights are on time. What happened yesterday was a network issue. Nobody can do anything about it,” a passenger at Delhi airport said.
“The global disruption that led to operational issues is almost resolved and our teams have made significant progress in restoring normal operations. However, customers may still experience delays and disruptions to schedules over the weekend,” budget carrier IndiGo said.
IndiGo, the largest airline by domestic market share with over 2,000 daily flights, had to cancel about 200 flights due to the Microsoft outage.
Two other airlines, SpiceJet and Akasa Air, reported late on Friday that all their systems at airports, including ticket bookings, were operational again.
SpiceJet said “all systems at airports, ticket bookings and call centres are running smoothly again following successful resolution of the Microsoft outage that impacted the aviation sector throughout the day”.
“While the global system outage of reservations, check-in and boarding systems presented an unprecedented operational challenge for our ground services team, Akasa Air confirms that all scheduled flights on Friday operated with minimal disruption and zero cancellations,” the airline said.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: Jul 20, 2024 | 11:55 PM IST