Chennai airport hit by Microsoft cloud services outage, over 40 flights delayed
As of 4 pm IST, the tech major said the underlying cause of the glitch has been fixed, although some residual impact will be seen on some of its services.
Air passengers at Chennai Airport
CHENNAI: Due to a widespread issue with Microsoft's cloud services, online operations at the Chennai airport were abruptly disrupted, resulting in delays for over 40 departing flights and considerable inconvenience for passengers. The global outage has affected multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud services.
The disruption occurred at 12 pm on Friday, causing the airport's website to malfunction. It significantly delayed the issuance of computerized boarding passes for airline staff. Consequently, airlines had to deploy additional staff to manually issue boarding passes at the counters.
The manual process further delayed boarding, affecting flights departing to destinations such as Mumbai, Lucknow, Bangalore, Madurai, Thiruvananthapuram, Patna, Siliguri, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Tuticorin, Tiruchy, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Pune, Goa, as well as international flights to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Sri Lanka, Dhaka, by approximately two hours.
Passengers bore the brunt of these delays, exacerbated by the lack of formal communication from airlines about when operations would normalize.
The Central government has instructed airport officials and airlines to ensure that passengers are provided with additional seating, water, and food.
International teams of engineers, including those at the Chennai airport, were swiftly mobilized to rectify the technical problem.
It is anticipated that within the next few hours, the internet glitch will be completely fixed and normal operations for all flights at the Chennai airport would be restored.
Meanwhile, airport officials stated that they responded to the challenge by setting up special counters wth additional staff to manually process boarding passes, thus reducing the impact to flight schedules.
Due to the technical issues, bookings, check-ins, and flight updates at Vistara, IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa Air airlines have all been affected.
The global Microsoft outage has hit not only flights but also companies, government offices, and banking operations, among other sectors.
As of 4 pm IST, the tech major said the underlying cause of the glitch has been fixed, although some residual impact will be seen on some of its services.
India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) stated that the issue was caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor.
"It has been reported that Windows hosts related to Crowd strike agent Falcon Sensor are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent update received in the product. The concerned Windows hosts are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) related to Falcon Sensor," the team said in an advisory.