IGI Airport immigration servers go down for an hour

CIOL Bureau



A technical glitch at IGI's immigration counters bring everything to a stand-still for an hour.

On June 9th around 8:30 PM, the immigration systems at IGI airport Terminal 3 went down for about an hour.

The immigration officers at the counters, were apparently not able t determine the reasons for the same, which kept hundreds of passengers arriving from international flights standing and waiting in long queues.

Sources tell us that some of the immigration staff are reported to have said that this is the highest downtime they've ever experienced at IGI. Usually, if the servers did go down, they would be back up in not more than 15 minutes.

Server downtime is not uncommon at airports. We've seen the same happening at check-in counters of different airlines, but whenever such things happen, the airlines staff quickly shifts to manual mode and starts giving out hand-written boarding passes.

In this case, the surprising thing is that none of the immigration staff were trained for switching to manual operation during emergencies, and a downtime of one hour is definitely serious. Since nothing moved for an hour, it clearly shows that they were not ready for it.

Well, IGI authorities have now learned it the hard way, and maybe they'll give their staff some extra training on how to shift to manual operation in such emergency situations.

One could imagine the plight of the tired passengers who spent hours on flights and landed up in a long queue after arriving in India.