Thousands of passengers were reportedly stranded at all airports all over India and overseas as India’s largest airline, IndiGo, which has over 60 pc market share suffered from a severe glitch in its check-in systems on Saturday. IndiGo is the market

According to aviation authorities, the technical glitch started at 12:30 in the afternoon and affected everything from online bookings to check-ins at airports nationwide. The delays led to overcrowding of the airports as IndiGo’s ground staff struggled to handle the check-in process manually, issuing hand-written boarding cards, that some of the passengers posted on their social media handles.

Though not amused by delays, IndiGo passengers were bemused by hand-written boarding cards

Though IndiGo acknowledged the glitch and the delays, it has so far not divulged the impact in terms of number of flights delayed or cancelled and neither has it released any information on the number of passengers impacted by the glitch. IndiGo’s own posts on X indicated that while the glitch was resolved late in the evening on Saturday, the cascading delays in flights and check-ins continued almost until midnight.

Social media platforms were flooded with posts by angry passengers who complained to poor handling of the situation by IndiGo and some passengers sought monetary compensation for the delays. Many also complained about missing their international flights on other carriers as their connecting IndiGo flight was heavily delayed.

The company first acknowledged the glitch at 13:44, citing a “temporary system slowdown across our network”. After over five hours it reported that part of the network that handled airport operations was restored, but added that “it may take a little time” to achieve full normalcy. According to flight tracking website Flightaware, IndiGo accounted for the most number of flights delayed globally, 889 of close to 9,900 running behind schedule on Saturday.

According to reports, Saturday’s disruptions were second only to the chaos that unfolded when a global Microsoft Windows outage on July 19 took down services worldwide. Then, IndiGo was the hardest hit and cancelled around 200 flights.