Airline and airport services affected Friday due to the global tech outage due to a system crash at Microsoft were back to near normal on Saturday, though the industry continued to face cancellation of scheduled flights.
Ticket booking and web check-in services resumed, while Digi Yatra was still down at a few airports. On Friday airlines had asked flyers to avoid making multiple booking attempts online after consumers complained of unsuccessful transactions.
As per aviation data provider Cirium, India witnessed 75 cancellations of a total of 3,612 scheduled flights till 5.30 pm on Saturday.
A statement issued by civil aviation minister K Rammohan Naidu on Saturday said: “Since 3 am (Saturday), airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now. We are constantly monitoring the operations at our airports.” He added that the airlines are ensuring travel readjustments and refunds are being taken care of.
While around 200 IndiGo flights were cancelled between July 19 and July 20, Air India, Akasa Air and SpiceJet claimed to not have cancelled any flights. Almost all flights were running one-three hours behind schedule on Friday.
“We confirm that none of Air India flights on July 19 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 IT infrastructure remained unaffected and continues to function as normal,” an Air India spokesperson 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, hitting operations of the corporate world, airlines and media companies.
All SpiceJet systems at airports, ticket bookings, and call centres are now up and running smoothly, a statement from the low-cost airline said. “The technical outage has been fully resolved, and all our systems are back to normal operations,” said Ajay Singh, chairman and managing director, SpiceJet.
