Flight operations at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport were thrown into disarray following a critical technical failure in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, leading to delays for over 400 flights. The trouble reportedly began Thursday evening when the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), which transmits flight plan data to controllers, stopped functioning. This failure forced air traffic controllers to manually process flight information—a significantly slower method that cascaded delays not only at Delhi but also at other major airports in northern India.
Major airlines including IndiGo, Air India, and SpiceJet acknowledged the disruptions, advising passengers to anticipate delays and check for flight updates. Flight tracking services recorded average departure delays ranging from 50 to 55 minutes, with some international flights delayed by nearly two hours. The Airports Authority of India confirmed technical teams are working to restore the AMSS but provided no clear timeline for resolution.
Amid the disruption, conflicting reports arose regarding the cause. Some sources speculated that a malware attack might have triggered the system failure by overloading message traffic. However, officials from the Ministry of Information Technology and Civil Aviation have refuted these claims, attributing the outage to a technical glitch linked to a software upgrade rather than a cyberattack. They emphasized ongoing investigations to determine the exact fault.
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