Microsoft outage causes 56 flight cancellations from India, 1,390 globally amid IT disruptions

 Indigo, Air India Express, SpiceJet and Akasa at the Bengaluru airport began checking in passengers manually on Friday, issuing handwritten boarding passes, after a global Microsoft outage led to the Navitaire Departure Control System stalling. | Photo Credit: PTI

As many as 56 flights originating from destinations in India have been cancelled so far according to Cirium and aviation analytics company. While the analytics firm did not attribute this number specifically to the IT outage, it noted that flight cancellations have been significantly higher following reports of Microsoft systems crashing across the world.  As per the data provided by Cirium, 1,390 flights have been cancelled as of 6 a.m. Eastern Time, globally and growing. 

For India specifically, Cirium said, “3,652 flights scheduled originating from Indian destinations, with 56 cancellations so far. This does not include inbound flights to India.”

The US market reported the highest number of cancellations “In the U.S domestic market (ie. US to US flying), there are more than 24,000 scheduled flights today, carrying up to 3.2M passengers .As of 6:00 a.m. Eastern, there are 512 cancelled flights today from U.S. origins, approximately 1.91%, which is significantly higher than usual at this point in the day.

Several Indian airlines and airports were impacted by the outage. Delhi Airport informed on Friday afternoon, “Due to the global IT issue, some of the services at the Delhi Airport were temporarily impacted.We are closely working with all our stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience to our flyers.”

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Bengaluru airport informed, “A global outage with the Navitaire Departure Control System (DCS) has been affecting operations of some airlines across their network, including BLR Airport since 10:40 IST on July 19, 2024. Indigo, Akasa, and SpiceJet in T1 and Air India Express in T2 are among the impacted airlines. The Common Use Terminal Equipment (CUTE) and Common Use Self Service (CUSS) systems are also experiencing disruptions.”