Global IT Outage Causes Flight Disruptions Across Indian Airports

A major global IT outage led to chaos at various airports in India, with dozens of flights being delayed or cancelled. The outage, triggered by an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, impacted multiple sectors including airlines and financial services. Manual check-ins caused long queues and delays.

Airports across the country experienced chaotic scenes on Friday as a widespread global computer outage caused delays and cancellations for dozens of flights. The outage also affected operations like cash withdrawals at some banks and halted functions at several brokerage firms.

One of the largest IT outages to date, the problem stemmed from an update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that disrupted Microsoft's Windows systems worldwide. This impacted financial institutions and airlines, with hospitals and television channels also experiencing interruptions.

In India, the disruption crashed airline check-in systems, leading to delays and cancellations for numerous flights. IndiGo alone cancelled around 200 flights, while many others faced delays as operations switched to manual mode.

(With inputs from agencies.)