A major disruption in Microsoft's cloud services led to widespread flight delays in India on Friday, with Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai airports facing the maximum brunt. Not only airlines, businesses, including banks, telecom companies, TV and radio broadcasters were affected after blue screen of death error screens were seen on Windows workstations across the globe.
The outage hit booking and check-in services of several airlines, including IndiGo, Akasa Airlines and SpiceJet. Several airlines resorted to manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and requested passengers to reach the airport early.
Budget airline SpiceJet said it was facing a technical issue in providing updates on flights. "Our team is actively working to resolve this issue," the airline posted on X.
Akasa Airlines said some of its online services would be temporarily unavailable at the Mumbai and Delhi airports. "Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable," it said.
IndiGo also warned passengers of experiencing slower check-ins and longer queues. "Our systems across the network are impacted by an ongoing issue with Microsoft Azure, which has resulted in increased wait times at our contact centres and airports," IndiGo tweeted.
Sources said the Ministry of Civil Aviation has instructed airlines to inform passengers via SMS about check-in delays or cancellation of flights. The DGCA, however, said no decision on grounding of flights have been taken.
The airport authorities are working on an on-ground management plan due to the influx of passengers.
The incident left several passengers in the lurch, with some complaining that they were not able to check in their luggage for the past one hour.
"Indigo servers are down. For the past hour, no one has been able to check in baggage or get boarding passes at Bangalore terminal 1," one passenger posted on X.
A stranded passenger at Goa airport said he received a boarding pass after standing in queue for two hours. "My flight was from Goa to Delhi and there was a delay due to server issues. They gave us a boarding pass, made by hand, with our names spelt wrong," he told PTI.
Several passengers took to social media to post images of handwritten boarding passes.
Microsoft reported ongoing problems with the Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 services. The outage also impacted flights around the world, especially the United States.
Frontier Airlines grounded flights for over two hours due to issues with Microsoft's services. It resumed operations later. US' Allegiant Air also faced disruptions as the airline reported issues with bookings.