Automation Failure Grips India’s Busiest Hub: Delhi Airport Descends into Gridlock as Glitch Delays Hundreds of Flights

India’s principal gateway to the world, the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGI) in Delhi, was paralyzed Friday after a crucial technical malfunction crippled the sophisticated systems responsible for managing air traffic, leading to chaos, mass cancellations, and delays that rippled outward across the nation’s northern airspace. The breakdown, which began late Thursday evening and escalated dramatically during the busy Friday morning peak hours, severely affected nearly 700 domestic and international flights, disrupting travel plans for tens of thousands of passengers and underscoring the brittle fragility of critical aviation infrastructure in one of the world’s fastest-growing air travel markets. The specific culprit was identified by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) as a glitch in the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), an essential computerized network that relays flight plan data between Air Traffic Control (ATC) and airlines.

With the AMSS unable to automatically feed essential routing and flight plan data to the Auto Track System used by controllers, the entire management process at India’s busiest airport was forced into an immediate, emergency reversal to manual operations. A senior airport source has confirmed to the media the severity of the situation, noting, “The system simply stopped providing the automated flight plans. Controllers had to physically write down and manually input every detail for every single flight plan, a process that is slow, cumbersome, and drastically reduces the number of aircraft movements we can handle safely per hour.” At an airport that typically manages well over 1,500 flight movements daily, this procedural slowdown immediately created a massive bottleneck. Flight tracking data from monitoring portals showed the impact was near-universal; by mid-day, approximately 91 percent of departing flights were facing average delays exceeding 50 minutes, with similar disruptions affecting arrivals.

The terminals quickly became scenes of frustration and extended waiting, as major carriers, including IndiGo, Air India, and SpiceJet, issued advisories urging passengers to prepare for significant disruption and check their revised schedules. Passengers who had arrived at the airport only to be informed of open-ended delays took to social media, describing long queues at boarding gates, crowded terminals, and extended periods trapped inside stationary aircraft on the tarmac awaiting manual clearance. For international travelers and those relying on connecting flights, the situation was particularly dire, as the technical failure in Delhi had a cascading effect, causing delays for onward flights at regional hubs in Mumbai, Jaipur, and Lucknow.

The incident has immediately raised pointed questions about the vulnerability and redundancy of the core digital infrastructure underpinning Indian aviation. While officials from the Information Technology Ministry has quickly denied speculation of a cyberattack, confirming the issue stemmed from a glitch during an internal software upgrade, the near-total shutdown of automated flight planning capabilities at such a critical junction reveals an alarming lack of robust, seamless backup systems. Experts argue that while manual fallback procedures exist to maintain safety, a testament to the skill of the air traffic controllers, they cannot handle the volume required by a 21st-century mega-hub like IGI, which is continually ranked among the busiest airports globally.

As technical teams from AAI and vendor partners worked frantically throughout the day to restore the AMSS and clear the massive backlog, officials cautioned that a return to complete normalcy would take many hours, well into the following day. The chaos served as a stark, high-profile reminder to both the government and the traveling public that a single, internal system failure has the power to bring the country’s entire air traffic apparatus to a grinding, embarrassing halt. For a nation that stakes its economic pride on rapidly modernizing its infrastructure, the Friday meltdown at its busiest airport is a sobering signal that investment in high-level technological resilience and redundancy must keep pace with the sheer volume of passenger traffic.