Microsoft Global Outage: SpiceJet, Akasa Air Operations Restored

Budget carrier Akasa Air said late on Friday it "successfully" navigated a daylong system outage due to the Microsoft Azure technical issue that affected operations across the global aviation industry. 

"While the global systems downtime of reservations, check-in and boarding systems posed an unprecedented operational challenge to our ground services team, Akasa Air  confirms that all ita scheduled flights on Friday operated with minimum disruptions and nil cancellations," the airline said in a statement. 

"Our team's 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 airline said.  

Meanwhile, SpiceJet said late on Friday that all its systems at airports, ticket bookings and call centres are up and running smoothly after a "successful resolution" of a Microsoft outage that impacted the aviation industry all through the day. 

"The technical outage has been fully resolved, and all our systems are back to normal operations," SpiceJet Chairman and Managing Director Ajay Singh said in a statement. 

Airports across the country witnessed chaotic scenes on Friday after dozens of flights were either delayed or cancelled after a widespread global computer outage that also hit operations like cash withdrawal at some banks, and impacted functioning of some brokerages. 

The issue started after the Microsoft outage that led to a halt in airlines, banking services and office work for people across the globe. Chairman and CEO at Microsoft, Satya Nadella mentioned on July 19, “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.” 

(With inputs from PTI)