About 40 IndiGo flights out of Mumbai were delayed on Monday after the low-cost carrier’s servers were down for about an hour in the morning leading to chaos at the airport that spilled over till the evening. This led to flights being delayed for up to four hours, inability to check passengers in and long queues of angry passengers at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport. A statement from the airline on Monday afternoon said, “We regret the inconvenience caused to our passengers today in the morning due to system being down across airports for under an hour. Our flights and check-in systems are operating normally now.” A source requesting anonymity said, “Around 40 flights were delayed out of Mumbai and the servers were up and running by around 11:35 am. Thirteen flights, however, were cancelled across the network and in total there was a 59.8 per cent departure delay and a 60.9 per cent arrival delay.” The source also stated that flights flying into Mumbai also had to face the closure of the city’s primary runway, which lead to slower flight movements on the secondary runway. Jahnavi Patel, scheduled to fly on an IndiGo flight from Mumbai to Bengaluru, said the flight was rescheduled multiple times due to delayed departure from Chandigarh. Patel said, “The flight was supposed to leave at 5 pm but was then rescheduled to 7 pm and then 8 pm. The situation at the airport is chaotic and passengers are getting really frustrated.” Flights continued to get delayed into the day at Mumbai, with many passengers made to wait inside the aircraft after boarding. Saket Jha, travelling from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, said, “The flight was scheduled to take off at 6.40 pm but it’s been two hours yet there were no signs of pushback. Passengers were made to board the aircraft but the AC was not turned on for more than an hour. The staff behaved very unprofessionally and only after pressure from some passengers, refreshments were served on board.” A source who wished to remain anonymous said, “The effects of a system going down are massive as a delay of a few flights can have a domino effect on other flights. Timely operation then depends not only on aircraft departing on time but also on aircraft arriving on time. Situation in Delhi, too, does not help as flights are anyway delayed from there due to issues with visibility due to smog.” Srijan Shashwat, travelling from Allahabad to Pune, said, “The flight took off an hour late from Allahabad and flew to Pune via Kolkata. At Kolkata we were told by cabin crew that IndiGo generated wrong boarding passes for passengers and the flight has been on the ground since and we are already delayed by an hour so far.”
