T
he day was expected to be a normal one for the country’s biggest airline.
However, India’s largest airline IndiGo’s website wasn’t allowing its visitors to make flight bookings and was displaying “No data available” message — the second time that happened this week for the airline.
The reason behind the breakdown is yet unknown, and the airline hasn’t replied back yet to an email query for comments.
It was not restricted to a single city or type of request. Reporters for Reuters from at least three cities were not able to make the booking using the site, while others had problems accessing the app.
It was not even an issue of being unable to make a new booking.
The IndiGo site experienced yet another technological breakdown on Friday, making several travelers unable to make a flight booking, conduct web check-ins, or access online services, along with facing login problems in the app.
The combination of these factors – making a booking, doing a check-in, and logging into the app – shows that the problem lies somewhere deep within the airline's internal systems.
Finally, the airline responded officially by releasing an advisory.
"Our core reservation system is having some problems and may cause some customers difficulties accessing our online services," stated the airline in their service advisory.
This was not a new response either. It was exactly the same one that IndiGo had given to customers two days ago.
This is where everyone in the business world begins to take notice.
According to IndiGo, which tweeted on Wednesday, it is having "intermittent issues" with its main reservation system that could make it hard for some customers to use its online resources, noting that it is working together with its partner to solve the issue.
Friday's website from IndiGo carried the same advisory as it did on Wednesday – and it was not immediately known whether the problems witnessed on Friday were related to the previous day's trouble, or whether the previous problem had already been solved.
In other words, IndiGo may not even have solved the initial problem – it may have just kept quiet for a few days before appearing again.
Friday and Wednesday outages were no one-off events as there had been weeks of similar albeit smaller complaints from regular travelers.
The technical glitches come after earlier complaints made in the previous weeks about the web check-in and seat selection offered by IndiGo, where some passengers mentioned that the "next" button did not work unless a certain seat was selected, which forced passengers to upgrade their seats.
Some users complained that although they had completed their web check-in process with an automatically assigned seat, they would get their boarding passes only after reaching the airport.
Whereas the earlier complaints were isolated complaints related to user interface, the latest outages seem to be more widespread and systemic.
It could not have come at a more awkward time for IndiGo's management.
It has certainly come at a bad time for CEO Willie Walsh, who joined the company just under five months ago, on August 3, after Pieter Elbers left the position amid allegations of operational mismanagement within the airline.
This could not be the sort of thing an incoming chief executive, whose job it is to get IndiGo back on track, needs within his first three weeks on the job.
It is precisely due to this that the reliability problems that arise from IndiGo become particularly important because of its importance within the realm of Indian aviation.
IndiGo accounted for 67% of domestic air travel market share in India back in July, and this means that more than two out of three domestic travelers rely on IndiGo's operations.
This was precisely what made the previous disaster that occurred with IndiGo such a significant event. Back in December, platform failure led to a massive cancellation of flights due to bad planning of the roster of pilots, leading to some 4,500 flights being cancelled, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded.
On the worst day during this period of crisis, the company had an on-time performance of only 35%, which is the lowest of any major Indian airline – and this went on for eight consecutive days.
This is not even the first time that IndiGo has faced a problem related to the malfunctioning of the booking system due to technological issues.
During the month of July 2024, IndiGo along with four other Indian airlines suffered from the problem with their booking systems, with Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage being cited as the reason behind the issue that affected all airports and airlines across the globe at the same time.
The present problem is however different, as the booking malfunction appears to be an internal problem for IndiGo’s reservations system.
In any case, the immediate concern at IndiGo is whether the technical fault had not really been resolved after all or whether this week's problem was something new that happened to crop up on the same system right away.
The answer to either of those possibilities would carry a significant message regarding IndiGo's technical reliability and the state of their reservation system architecture.
An uncorrected problem indicates technical debt at IndiGo that keeps cropping up over time unless it gets solved.
