About 30-35 flights of flag carrier Air India and thousands of its passengers across the world were affected after a glitch in its passenger services systems - developed by aviation IT solutions firm SITA - brought down the airline’s check-in and other key systems for more than five hours on Saturday morning. While Air India’s flights across its domestic and international network were delayed between 3.30 am and 8.50 am, during which the network was down, it has had a cascading effect on over 150 of its later flights, and those scheduled till at least 8 pm are now delayed. Also read | Passengers stranded at Bangalore airport; four flights delayed, one cancelled Air India flight delays: What went wrong? According to an Air India spokesperson, SITA’s systems were down for scheduled maintenance earlier on Saturday. However, upon coming back up they developed a glitch that had an impact across Air India’s systems. In June last year, too, Air India’s check-in software was affected due to unexpected network connectivity issues at SITA Atlanta data centre. While, in June, the glitch had impacted SITA’s customers across the board, Saturday’s incident has only affected Air India. “SITA experienced a complex system issue during server maintenance early this morning, which resulted in operational disruption to Air India flights. We have now fully restored services at all airports where Air India was affected. Our priority remains, as always, to ensure a stable system where customers can conduct business efficiently and effectively, and we are undertaking a full investigation to understand the root cause and prevent a recurrence. We deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused to the airline and their customers owing to this disruption,” SITA said in a statement. Cascading impact It is pertinent to note that Air India is a member of Star Alliance and has codeshare agreements with a number of other airlines. Therefore, passengers booked on Air India flights through other airlines such as Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada, Thai, United, Turkish Airlines, etc will also have their onward flights affected.
