BENGALURU: A system outage for nearly an hour at Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) on Wednesday evening, forced all airlines to resort to issue of handwritten boarding passes to passengers. Travellers had to wait in long queues in front of counters to collect their passes, leading to anger and grumbling. 

An airport source said, “There was a system outage between 6 pm and 7 pm at the airport. There was a 
delay in issuing boarding passes over counters due to this. It was set right and everything was normal later.” 

According to Krunal Brahm Bhatt, finance manager with an IT firm, travelling to Chennai via a Jet Airways flight due to depart at 8.35pm, told TNIE, “There was confusion and long queues. When we asked staffers issuing boarding passes, we were told that there was a system problem and only manually written boarding passes were being issued to.” Bhatt also tweeted a picture of passengers in queues at KIA.

His colleague, Khatri Rajiv Shivdutta, suffered more. “The counter staffer forgot to write today’s date on his pass and was told to return and get it written after security clearance,” Bhatt said.

About the issue, a Jet Airways spokesperson, said, “Though boarding passes for our passengers are issued by us, Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) owns all the systems. It is not the problem of one airline but of BIAL as a whole.” 

Responding to a passenger complaint, Sanjeev Kapoor, chief strategy and commerical officer, Vistara, tweeted, “There was a system failure due to a cut cable at a third-party provider of airport tech services. Our staff had to switch to manual processing...” Neither the BIAL CEO nor the communications team responded to our calls and messages.