Microsoft outage leads to flights cancellations, manual operations at airports

Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed in India due to a global outage in Microsoft applications on Friday.

IndiGo, an Indian carrier said that several of its flights were canceled or delayed due to outages faced by its cloud server software, an Indian media outlet reported.

“This outage, which began on July 19, has severely disrupted airline operations by impacting critical systems used for flight operations, passenger check-in, and baggage handling. Airlines, airports and other transport systems across the world are facing similar issues,” IndiGo said in a statement.

The airlines revealed that it switched to manual operations in which the staff members were handing hand-written boarding passes and documents for check-ins.

Amid the Microsoft outage, major airports in India’s Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru were shifted to manual operations causing severe delays in routine operations.

IndiGo has since asked its passengers to inquire about their flight before leaving for airports as they prioritised passengers who had departures in the next three to four hours.

Similarly, other airlines such as Akasa and SpiceJet also faced severe disruptions in flight operations at different airports.

Delhi Airport posted on X that some services at the airport were temporarily impacted due to the global IT outage.

“We are closely working with all our stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience to our flyers,” it said.

A passenger took to social media to share that the airlines’ staff were forced to issue hand-written boarding passes amid the global outage.

“The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today,” he wrote in a post on X.

Over in China, local media outlets reported that breakdown left the international airport in Hong Kong in “chaos”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft said that it was working to resolve the issue that affected businesses, flight operations and media channels around the world.

“Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress,” Microsoft 365 Status said in an X post.

The issue was reportedly triggered from a software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that grounded flights, forced some broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s customers and that a fix was being deployed.