Navitaire outage briefly hits airline ops in India, Europe
What's the story
Airlines in India and parts of Europe faced brief operational disruptions on Thursday due to a temporary outage of Navitaire. The system is widely used by airlines for reservations and departure control. According to Mint, the systems were restored within an hour and no major flight delays were reported. In India, the glitch affected all airlines except Air India between 6:45am and 7:28am and again intermittently from 8:10am to 8:25am.
System significance
Glitch leads to longer queues during peak travel hours
This led to temporary delays in check-in and boarding processes at several airports, including Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA). Navitaire, a subsidiary of Amadeus, provides reservation and departure control systems to low-cost and hybrid carriers globally. The outage affected passenger processing systems such as check-in counters and boarding systems, leading to longer queues during peak travel hours. But operations continued manually with airlines switching to backup procedures to minimize delays, officials said.
Flight restrictions
NOTAM issued in Delhi for AI summit
A Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) was also issued in and around Delhi due to the ongoing Artificial Intelligence Summit 2026. The NOTAM imposed temporary flight restrictions at IGIA and all airports within a 300km radius from 7:30am to 3pm. Only scheduled commercial services, summit-related VIP flights cleared in advance, and designated defense/emergency operations were allowed during this time, according to the NOTAM seen by HT.
Past incidents
Similar disruptions in past months
This isn't the first time such a disruption has occurred. In December last year, a "third-party system" technical glitch had disrupted check-ins at multiple airports and delayed flights. The issue was resolved hours later with operations returning to normal. Similarly, in November 2025, over 400 flights were delayed due to an issue with the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) at IGIA.