Chaos at airports as Microsoft outage grounds over 280 flights

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, July 19

A Microsoft outage on Friday grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and media houses off air globally in a massive disruption that highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. It said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

In India, airport and airline operations were crippled across all states, leading to widespread cancellation of flights. IndiGo, which has the largest share of domestic passenger traffic, alone cancelled 287 flights. The carrier said its flights were experiencing delays and cancellations due to the global outage. In addition to this, hundreds of flights were delayed by a considerable time across airlines’ networks due to the outage, which reportedly started from 10.40 am.

As services like bookings, check-in and boarding moved to manual mode, taking longer than expected time and leading to long queues at airports, passengers, including those who were travelling due to emergency reasons, were seen complaining about the lack of information about their flights and venting out ire on airline staff. The web check-in feature, which remained temporarily unavailable across airports, led to further chaos.

Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu directed the airport authorities and airlines to be compassionate and provide extra seating, water and food to the passengers. The ministry also asked airlines to give regular information to passengers about their flight status.

The Reserve Bank of India said 10 banks and non-banking finance companies had minor disruptions. Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the ministry was continually in touch with Microsoft, which in turn was actively working with impacted entities.