2 days after global outage: Airlines play catch-up with flight schedule | News

The Indian aviation sector continued to take a hit from the global Microsoft outage two days ago, with heavy rains in Mumbai aggravating the situation.

About 1,000 flights were behind schedule on Sunday at three of the busiest Indian airports, with Mumbai airport recording 18 cancellations, according to people in the know.

 

Live flight tracker flightradar24 showed at least 417 flights (305 departures and 112 arrivals) faced delays on Sunday at the Delhi International Airport. The country’s busiest airport handles about 1,260 daily scheduled flights.

The Mumbai airport, meanwhile, had to suspend its runway operations twice on Sunday — for eight minutes between 12.12 PM and 12.20 PM, and for 15 minutes between 1 PM and 1.15 PM — due to low visibility amid adverse weather conditions, sources said. About 18 flights to and from the financial capital were cancelled, with 12 from IndiGo, followed by four from Air India and two from Vistara. The Mumbai airport, which is India’s second busiest, handles about 870 daily scheduled flights. At least 430 flights (272 departures and 158 arrivals) reported delays on Sunday at Mumbai airport, according to flightradar24.

“Heavy rains in Mumbai are affecting flight operations and resulting in cancellation and diversion of some of our flights,” Air India said on X, adding that it was offering full refunds, or a one-time complimentary rescheduling options to affected passengers.

 

On Friday, a faulty update by cyber security firm CrowdStrike led to the outage of Microsoft apps and services across the world for several hours. About 400 flights were cancelled in India on Friday and Saturday due to this issue. About 300 of those were from IndiGo.

 

IndiGo has restored its system and therefore, there were no cancellations due to the outage on Sunday, sources said. They added that the airline was expecting to normalise operations within the next two days.

 

At least 150 flights (103 departures and 49 arrivals) faced delays on Friday at the Bengaluru International Airport, which handles about 690 daily scheduled flights.

 

SpiceJet, Air India, and Akasa Air said they had not cancelled any flights during the last three days due to the outage. However, the effect of the outage was seen on their on-time performance on Friday and Saturday.

 

Only about 32.7 per cent of SpiceJet flights were on time on Saturday, according to the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s data.

 

Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu had on Saturday stated that airline systems had started working normally across India by 3 PM on Saturday. There was a backlog because of disruptions on Friday, and it was getting cleared gradually, he had added.

First Published: Jul 21 2024 | 6:18 PM IST