BHUBANESWAR: The Microsoft outage led to cancellation of over 30 flights from the Biju Patnaik International Airport (BPIA) besides causing severe inconvenience to travellers on Friday.
Several airlines had to issue handwritten boarding passes to the passengers. IndiGo cancelled at least six flights from Bhubaneswar to Mumbai, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, New Delhi and Hyderabad. It also shared a list of flights which were cancelled on Friday and Saturday.
BPIA director Prasanna Pradhan told TNIE that passengers started facing problems due to the glitch after 10 am. Airline reservation system worked but there were issues in the check-in system for which manual boarding passes were issued to the fliers, he said.
A long queue of anxious passengers could be seen outside the counters at the city airport. The cancellations and delays left them in a catch-22 situation because instantly opting for other mode of transport was practically impossible.
A passenger who was to leave for Mumbai expressed apprehensions that the cancellations may lead to a rise in the already-elevated tickets prices. While the demand of tickets is expected to increase significantly this weekend, travel agents pointed out that the global outage also affected the bookings on the day.
“Flight bookings were extremely slow on the day. In some bookings, transactions were declined and in a few others, the process came to halt during the payment process,” said Deepak Panda, managing director Usha Travels. On an average, about seven flights each operate from Bhubaneswar to New Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru everyday; five to Mumbai, three to Hyderabad and one each to Pune and Chennai.