KUALA LUMPUR – Passengers at Kuala Lumpur International Airport Terminal 2 (KLIA T2) continue to face delays in boarding flights, with many enduring long queues for check-in due to a global IT outage that began yesterday.
Videos posted on X and TikTok today indicate that some flights have been delayed.
The IT disruption has caused significant travel issues at airports across Europe, the United States and Australia, and has also affected the operations of several local airlines based at KLIA T2.
Additionally, all passengers are currently required to check in manually, which has led to extended wait times at the airport.
X user Hanana lamented that she missed her flight to Perth, where she was supposed to meet someone.
“AirAsia system failure; all passengers could not have their second (leg) boarding pass printed when checked in at origin,people queuing at transfer counter, with only 2 staff on duty… I was worried about her not knowing what to do, so I turned on the in-flight WiFi… why can’t I use the electronic boarding pass?”
Another user, MK Farhan, said there might be a delay of one to two hours even after passengers boarded the plane.
“Everything is manual: from relaying info between the pilot and the ground team to cross-checking data through walkie-talkie, even the counter faced issues printing your boarding pass,” he added.
Meanwhile, user @Klchan3 said: “For those travelling out of KLIA2, be warned that there are long queues because the kiosk check-in machines are down.
“The good news is that if you have e-boarding or printed-boarding with light luggage, you don’t have to queue to check in or drop off oversized luggage.”
User @eljohn88 said: “Crowds and queues really built up over the two hours people were waiting. People had been calm earlier, but the shouting eventually started. Serious sprinting is still going on (throughout the) airport.”
The outage came as cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike experienced a major disruption yesterday following an issue with a recent tech update.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” its chief executive George Kurtz said in a statement on X.
Meanwhile, National Cyber Security Agency chief executive Megat Zuhairy Megat Tajuddin assured the public that the disruption was linked to CrowdStrike’s software updating, causing Microsoft systems to continuously restart – or bootloop.
The issue affected almost all online operations worldwide across various industries using Microsoft-based systems, including banks, aviation, telecommunications firms, television and radio broadcasts, and supermarkets, forcing them to resort to manual transactions on paper. – July 20, 2024
