KUALA LUMPUR (July 22): AirAsia, the low-cost airline under Capital A Bhd (KL:CAPITALA), said operations are back to normal on Monday, after recovering all of its systems as the global IT outage entered its third day.

The airline has resorted to manual processing since Friday involving regulatory and immigration compliance procedures to meet safety, security and border requirements, AirAsia said in a statement. Many fliers experienced long queues as they had to be verified individually, it noted.

Still, AirAsia said it managed to fly more than 500,000 travellers in 3,000 flights to their destinations over the weekend.

"We are now back to normal systems-wise,” said AirAsia Aviation Group chief executive officer Bo Lingam. “Once our service recovery is completed, we are looking forward to climbing back to pre-outage on-time performance of above 80%.”

A global tech outage had disrupted operations across multiple industries around the world, especially the aviation sector, on Friday, causing slower check-ins and longer queues at airports.

Major US airlines — American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines — were reported to have grounded all flights regardless of their destination while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.

AirAsia and Firefly said its online booking and check-in systems were impacted by the outage. However, Malaysia Airlines said it was not affected by the same issue. Nevertheless, no flights were reported to be cancelled by these airlines on Friday.

Meanwhile, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (KL:AIRPORT) said its network of airports in Malaysia remained unaffected by the global outage.

The outage was believed to be caused by CrowdStrike Holdings Inc, an American cyber security technology company based in Austin, Texas, which provides endpoint protection, threat intelligence and cyberattack response services.