Microsoft Outage: Air India, Akasa Say Operations Back On Track

Airlines including Air India, Akasa Air and SpiceJet announced Saturday that they have resumed normal services after a day of disruption due to a Microsoft global outage. While carriers tried to allay passengers' concerns over flight cancellations and service disruptions, sporadic passenger complaints over delays and cancellations were seen today as well.

Earlier today, Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu confirmed the restoration of airline systems following what is being touted as the biggest IT outage ever.

The minister stated that airline systems across airports have started working normally, and all issues are likely to be resolved by Saturday noon. The aviation ministry is constantly monitoring the operations at airports and airlines to ensure travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of, he added.

"Since 3:00 a.m. (Saturday), Airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now," Naidu said in the statement as per PTI.

Air India said on Saturday that none of its flights on July 19 were cancelled, though there were some delays due to the impact of the Microsoft outage on airport services. The airlines said its systems continued to function as normal today.

However, a user on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, highlighted that Air India flight AI 238 was cancelled.

"@airindia, why flight ai 238 has been cancelled (sic)," posted one Nabeel Nisar.

To this, Air India responded that the airline's team has been alerted to provide assistance.

Akasa Air said that the airline navigated global systems outage with zero flight cancellations on Friday. "While the global systems downtime of reservations, check-in and boarding systems posed an unprecedented operational challenge to our ground services team, Akasa Air is proud to confirm that all our scheduled flights today operated with minimum disruptions and nil cancellations." it said.

Our team's tireless efforts and swift response across flight dispatch, airport services, care centre collaborating  to activate our operations continuity plan that called for manual processes including manual check-in and boarding of thousands of passengers and yet maintain continuity of our services with nil cancellation of flights, the statement added.

"Unable to pay money for seat selected, site getting on refreshed. Unable to complete web check in," posted an X user Abhijeet Pillai.

On Social Media platform X, IndiGo acknowledged the operational challenges posed by the outage, focusing efforts on restoring services, particularly baggage handling, which had been affected. The airline reassured passengers, encouraging them to check flight statuses and offering alternatives or refunds for canceled flights, underscoring their commitment to customer service amidst disruptions.