NEW DELHI/MUMBAI,
Airline ops in India disrupted; Market, banks, payment systems unaffected...
AIRPORTS across the country witnessed chaotic scenes on Friday after dozens of flights were either delayed or cancelled after a widespread global computer outage that also hit operations like cash withdrawal at some banks, and impacted functioning of some brokerages.
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.
In India, it led to crashing of airline check-in systems, causing delays and cancellation of dozens of flights.
IndiGo alone cancelled around 200 flights. Hundreds of other flights got delayed as bookings, check-in and boarding moved to manual mode.
Airports from Chennai to Delhi witnessed chaotic scenes as harried passengers argued with airline staff over either not informing about delays and cancellations or not giving them alternate flights. Web check-in services were not available, leading to long queues at check-in counters and over-crowded lounges at several airports.
IndiGo, Akasa Air, Vistara, Air India, SpiceJet and Air India Express posted messages on X saying they were facing issues. Passengers were issued hand-written boarding passes and the entire process of doing manual ticketing as well as passenger and luggage check-in took 30-40 minutes per person, some travellers said.
According to preliminary data put out by aviation analytics firm Cirium on the global IT disruption in the afternoon, 56 out of 3,652 flights scheduled from Indian destinations were cancelled.
Airlines slowly began resuming some operations but making up for the delayed or cancelled flights may take some time.
Union Civil Aviation Minister Rammohan Naidu assured passengers that his Ministry and Airports Authority of India (AAI) are actively managing the situation using manual methods to ensure minimal disruption.
“The reasons for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue,” Minister for Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said.
While some brokerage firms, including Nuvama Wealth Management, Edelweiss Mutual Fund, Motilal Oswal, IIFL Securities, 5Paisa Capital, and Angel Broking, faced technical issues, stock exchanges NSE and BSE said their operations were running normally.
Auto major Maruti Suzuki India said it had briefly halted production and dispatch operations due to the outage.
Tata Motors passenger EV arm in a post on X said telephone lines at its contact centre are not functioning and it is working hard to resolve the issue.
IT major Wipro said while its own operations remained unaffected, it was assisting clients in the US and Europe who faced issues.
“Earlier today, a Crowdstrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Vaishnaw said the IT Ministry is continually in touch with Microsoft, which in turn is actively working with impacted entities.