Airline systems across airports working normally, says Civil Aviation Ministry day after Microsoft outage hit flights

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NEW DELHI: After Microsoft outage grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and media houses off air globally in a massive disruption on Friday, the Civil Aviation Ministry said that airline systems across airports have been working normally since 3 am Saturday.

The Ministry said that all issues including backlogs are expected to be resolved by noon today.

“Since 3 am in the night Airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going on smoothly now. There is a backlog because of disruptions yesterday, and it is getting cleared gradually. By noon today, we expect all issues to be resolved”, a Civil Aviation Ministry communique posted on X by Minister Ram Mohan Naidu said.

The Microsoft outage on Friday threw life out of gears in airports across the country and led to widespread cancellation of flights.

“We are constantly monitoring the operations in our airports and also with the airlines ensuring travel readjustment and refunds are taken care of. We thank you for your patience”, the Civil Aviation Ministry update said.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on Friday said that the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. It said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

In India, airport and airline operations were crippled across all states, leading to widespread cancellation of flights. IndiGo, which has the largest share of domestic passenger traffic, alone cancelled 287 flights.

In addition to this, hundreds of flights were delayed by a considerable time across airlines’ networks due to the outage, which reportedly started from 10.40 am.