This was the very worst tragedy that unfolded on Thursday morning, February 19, 2026, at Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport in Delhi on a major technical problem in Delhi. Numerous airlines think IndiGo, Akasa Air, Air India Express, and SpiceJet face giant queues and delays in check-in and boarding a few hours of business across India when key servers glitch suddenly experienced a massive failure in their systems as major servers crashed and the check-in and boarding process was disrupted for major airlines. The
Cause: An OutAGE of the Navitaire Server
The disruption started early Thursday morning between 6:45 a.m. 7:28 a.m. The technical glitch had arisen in the Navitaire server, a critical third-party software used by many low-cost carriers to handle reservations, check-ins and boarding, aviation sources said. The 43-minute outage meant digital check-in counters and boarding pass scanners couldn’t see a single system.
This led airline ground staff to resort to manual processing, a much slower method that was not able to handle the high morning footfall.
Effect on airlines and terminals
Although the bottleneck for the disruption was Terminal 3 at Delhi Airport, the ripple effect was also seen along major hubs including Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai. Airlines Impacted: IndiGo, Akasa Air, Air India Express and SpiceJet.
- Passenger experience: According to travelers, check-in counters had been "sea of people". It is true by and large, but the manual verification process is slow, causing many people to miss their flight.
- Status: The system was completely restored at 8:25 AM. But while the servers are back online, it is anticipated that so-called "consequential delays" will continue throughout the day as airlines sort through the backlog.
Airlines Issue Advisories
Airlines have shared on social media messages encouraging patience and issuing messages to guide travelers:
- Check status: Passengers should try to see their live progress today on airline apps or websites before en route to the airport.
- Arrive Early: Even after services have been restored, airlines suggest arriving 3 to 4 hours early for domestic flights today for the remaining congestion.
- Web Check-in: Passengers that have completed web check-in and are “baggage-only” are moving more quickly, though baggage drop systems were also briefly sluggish.
Why Are These Bugs So Frequent?
That is only the latest in a string of technical snafus that have dogged Indian aviation in the past few months. Analysts refer to too much dependence on a handful of global third-party service providers, including Navitaire and Microsoft Azure. If there is a glitch in these central nodes the effect will be instant and national, underlining the importance of robust and comprehensive local backup architectures for some of the country's largest airports.
