Kuala Lumpur International Airport In Chaos Due To Systems Outage

Kuala Lumpur International Airport has been in chaos since Thursday when the airport management systems malfunctioned.

This has affected how airlines are checking in passengers, how luggage is loaded, how flight information is displayed and immigration clearance.

Here’s an excerpt from Malay Mail (access their piece here):

The massive outage of the airport systems at both terminals of the KLIA was said to have started at night on August 21 and continued throughout yesterday, affecting check-in counters, flight information displays systems (FIDS), baggage handling, its MYairportd mobile application and the credit card systems at even retail and food and beverage stores.

Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad (MAHB) said it is still trying to stabilise its systems at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) as at 6am today.

And here from the Straits Times (access their piece here):

Up to 20 flights departing Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) yesterday morning were delayed, said airport operator Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad (MAHB), after check-in and baggage systems were disrupted the night before.

Last night, technical teams received replacement equipment and aimed to resolve the situation by this morning.

The disruption also affected immigration autogates, forcing immigration officers to process travel documents manually.

Conclusion

Sebastian was at the airport earlier today and sent in the above photos. The airport has made announcements not to scream at the staff (tensions must have been high).

It is not unusual for individual airline’s systems to go briefly down, which has happened with BA few times in the recent past, but rarely you see the entire airport’s information systems to crash this way.

Let’s hope that the airport has required expertise on hand to deal with this and regular operations can be restored soon.