K Rammohan Naidu said since 3am, airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now, he added.
Civil aviation minister K Rammohan Naidu said airline systems across airports have started working normally since 3am on Saturday, a day after a massive worldwide Microsoft outage.
“Since 3 AM (Saturday), Airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now,” K Rammohan Naidu said in a statement. Airline systems across airports were impacted due to a global IT outage on Friday.
The aviation ministry is constantly monitoring the operations at airports and airlines to ensure travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of, the minister added.
Meanwhile, Air India said none of its flights were cancelled on Saturday on the account of the worldwide outage of travel systems.
“We confirm that none of the Air India flights on 19 July were 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. Air India’s own, resilient IT infrastructure remained unaffected yesterday and continues to function as normal,” the Air India spokespersons said in a statement.
The statement comes even as several airports across India reportedly continued to experience technical glitches for the second day on Saturday. Passengers faced significant disruptions at major airports, including Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai, media reports claimed. Even though Microsoft announced on Friday that services had been restored, the chaos at the airport, with long lines at check-in counters and slow check-ins, persists.
The technical problems started on July 19, when a large outage impacted many sectors globally, especially aviation. The issue arose from a technical glitch after CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring software sent an update that caused Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity firm that supplies antivirus software to Microsoft, identified the problem in its software and rolled out fixes.
At the Delhi airport, unnamed sources told Business Today that IndiGo still had long lines at its counters on Saturday. The airline’s staff said the delays were due to system disruptions from the Microsoft outage, which still hadn’t been fully resolved for them.
Speaking to news agency ANI, a passenger said that most flights were delayed on Saturday at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. They said, “I am travelling to London, and my flight is delayed by half an hour at least. There is a long queue outside the airport. Most of the flights are delayed.”
A passenger at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport told ANI that they faced many problems because of the outage and that they hadn’t slept all night. “I was travelling from Mumbai to Bengaluru yesterday. The flight got cancelled…Although we were provided with the service, but they did not accommodate us. We had to wait for the whole night and have not slept for the whole night.”
A source from the Mumbai airport told Business that on July 19, even after Microsoft announced operations were restored, IndiGo continued to operate manually. They issued manual boarding passes and conducted the boarding process manually, causing more delays.
Major Indian airlines, including IndiGo, SpiceJet, Air India and Vistara, also faced significant disruptions. On Friday, IndiGo cancelled about 200 flights across India, citing the global system outage.
Moreover, flights at the Chennai Airport have also been reported disrupted and air traffic was also affected due to the blue screen error for the second day.
A passenger named Prabakaran, who came to catch a flight to the Maldives, said he didn’t know where to stay. “From tomorrow (Sunday), my work permit gets over, so I am in a must-go situation to go to the Maldives today (Saturday), but due to the cancelled flight, I have been asked to go tomorrow. I am clueless about where to stay and about job assurance,” he said.
Another passenger said, “I am a medical doctor from Sri Lanka. I was to go to Bhubaneswar to give a lecture, but yesterday night my flight got cancelled. Then today morning, I couldn’t find a flight back to Bhubaneswar. So I’m going back to Sri Lanka, but now I cannot get a flight, so I’m stuck here.”
On Friday, Microsoft Windows users were facing the “Blue Screen of Death” error, causing their computers to shut down or restart.
The outage impacted numerous companies across different sectors, including airlines, banks, food chains, brokerage firms, news organisations and railway networks. The travel industry was particularly hit, leading to major flight delays worldwide.
