KUALA LUMPUR (July 20): AirAsia resumed its online check-in operation at 2pm on Saturday, after being thrown into turmoil by a global information technology (IT) glitch a day earlier.
AirAsia deputy group chief executive officer (airline operations) Datuk Captain Chester Voo said the low-cost carrier will continue to monitor the situation.
He advised passengers to arrive early at the airport to avoid potential delays and long queues.
“Regardless of the challenge, we are extremely resilient, because it is important for us to put people first, as they pay money to fly, although the disruption is global and not caused by us,” he told Bernama.
Voo also reported that on Saturday, AirAsia was managing over 168,000 passengers on 941 flights under its seven air operator certificates, including AirAsia Malaysia, AirAsia Philippines, AirAsia Indonesia, Thai AirAsia, AirAsia Cambodia, AirAsia X and Thai AirAsia X.
According to Voo, this is the first time in recent years that the airline has experienced a system blackout of such magnitude, necessitating a complete switch to paper mode.
“With all the experts we have and the backup data, we worked tirelessly to locate passengers accordingly. In manual mode, every process needs to be verified as everything is regulated in the airline industry.
“We needed to go through the safety, regulatory and compliance processes manually, which means people had to endure long queues to be verified one at a time, and that was very painful,” he explained.
The airline has reportedly strengthened its operations to manage the weekend rush at the airport by deploying more than 200 ground staff, nearly 100 'Allstars' volunteers, and security personnel to help mitigate the situation.
Voo also expressed hope that on-time performance (OTP) would return to normal, with the resumption of the online check-in system.
“We had about 88% OTP, but with this global chaos, it gradually dropped further. We hope to be back to normal soon,” he said.
Voo thanked all the passengers for their patience and trust in AirAsia during the global outage managed in full manual mode.
“We would also like to thank the Ministry of Transport, the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (KL:AIRPORT), and all relevant ministries and agencies for their support and assistance during the crisis,” he added.
A day ago, major institutions such as airlines, banks, media channels and hospitals in several countries were reportedly affected by the global IT outage.
The outage was linked to global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc, an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas, which provides endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.
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