Imagine the heart of India’s air travel network—Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA)—suddenly paralyzed, not by weather, but by a silent, invisible threat.
That’s exactly what happened when a crippling technical glitch in the airport’s Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) essentially broke the communication link for flight takeoffs.
The result? A travel nightmare that delayed at least 600 flights!
The AMSS is the critical signaling software that tells Air Traffic Control (ATC) when planes can depart. When it failed, operations ground to a halt. Teams, including officials from the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Original Equipment Manufacturer, scrambled to manually process every single flight plan.
This heroic, manual effort was enough to keep some planes moving, but it meant a process that normally takes seconds was now taking three to four times longer.
For passengers, the day turned into an absolute nightmare: endless queues, frantic waiting for updates, and travel plans—from business trips to family reunions—shredded in an instant.
Though the system was eventually fixed by 9 pm, this incident is a chilling reminder of how dependent global infrastructure is on a single line of code, and how quickly a tiny technical failure can trigger mass chaos.
