AirAsia check-in system at Hong Kong airport down for 1½ hours, day after global IT outage

Airport Authority confirms temporary fault with AirAsia’s passenger check-in system between 9am and 10.30am

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AirAsia passengers queue at Hong Kong airport following problems with the airline’s check-in system. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Published: 10:41am, 20 Jul 2024Updated: 10:46pm, 20 Jul 2024

Disgruntled passengers were once again forced to wait in long queues at Hong Kong’s airport on Saturday when carrier AirAsia’s check-in system went down for about 90 minutes, a day after some airlines were affected by a global IT service outage.

Budget airline HK Express also announced in the morning that 20 of its flights remained cancelled, with some passengers stranded overnight complaining of poor contingency arrangements.

The Airport Authority confirmed there was a temporary fault with AirAsia’s check-in system at around 9am, forcing airline staff to manually process passengers.

“The system fully resumed normal operations at about 10.30am,” a spokesman said. “According to our understanding, the cause of the incident was not related to the malfunction of Microsoft systems [on Friday].”

The authority earlier in the day said all systems were back to normal following the worldwide IT outage.

The city’s No 2 official, Eric Chan Kwok-ki, said on Saturday that Deputy Chief Secretary Warner Cheuk Wing-hing had been tasked with monitoring the situation and had already urged Microsoft to restore normal operations.

“[Cheuk] has communicated with Microsoft over the phone and pushed them to restore normal operations as soon as possible. We hope to resume all affected services in Hong Kong [on Saturday],” he said.