Govt Admits Cyber Attack Behind IGI Flight Delays
- By Thetripurapost Desk, New Delhi
- Dec 01, 2025
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The Union government has officially acknowledged that the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGI), Delhi, was tampered with on November 7, triggering a cascade of disruptions that paralysed flight operations for more than 12 hours. Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ramamohan Naidu, addressing the Rajya Sabha on Monday, confirmed that the manipulation resulted in incorrect navigational signals being received by aircraft — a cyber-attack phenomenon known as GPS spoofing.
The incident, which caused the delay of over 800 domestic and international flights and the cancellation of 20, has emerged as one of India’s most serious aviation-system breaches in recent years. The minister admitted that the threat of ransomware, malware, and signal-interference attacks has escalated globally, prompting the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to implement “advanced cybersecurity protocols” to safeguard critical aviation infrastructure.
A Day of Systemic Collapse: What Happened on 7 November
The crisis began around 9:00 a.m., when the AMSS — the core messaging backbone of Air Traffic Control (ATC) — suffered a severe malfunction. Although the system was restored only by 9:30 p.m., technical complaints and operational inconsistencies continued into the evening. The disruption triggered unprecedented congestion across terminals, with long queues at boarding gates and widespread confusion among passengers.
Flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 recorded an average delay of 50 minutes per flight, while ripple effects were observed across major airports including Mumbai, Bhopal, Chandigarh, and Amritsar.
Major carriers — IndiGo, Air India, Air India Express, SpiceJet, and Akasa Air — issued rolling advisories throughout the day as they attempted to manage cascading schedule disruptions.
The Civil Aviation Minister himself visited the ATC tower to review operations and assess the system failure.
Manual Operations Return After a Decade
An ATC official explained that prior to AMSS adoption, flight plans from airlines were received manually, but the automated system had since become the operational backbone of ATC communications.
With the AMSS down, controllers were forced back into manual mode, slowing the approval of:
The manual load dramatically increased the chances of human error, raised safety risks, and caused procedural bottlenecks across runways.
Airport authorities later issued an advisory urging passengers to coordinate closely with their airlines while the system’s stability continued to be monitored.
Understanding AMSS: The Nervous System of Modern Air Traffic Control
The AMSS is a mission-critical messaging infrastructure that exchanges thousands of text-based messages per day between:
These messages include:
A system failure renders all automatic synchronisation inactive — a scenario aviation experts consider one of the most serious risks to air-traffic safety and efficiency.
A Global Pattern of Aviation System Failures
The November 7 AMSS breach places India alongside several international system-failure events:
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CrowdStrike Outage (July 2024):
Global IT crash grounded 7,000 flights, affecting 1.3 million passengers.
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UK ATC Failure (August 2023):
More than 600 flights grounded, impacting 700,000 passengers.
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Delta Data Centre Failure (August 2016):
Over 2,100 flights hit, stranding 90,000 passengers.
Experts note that increasing digitalisation of aviation systems has made airports highly vulnerable to cyber intrusions, system corruption, and procedural breakdowns.
Government Response and the Road Ahead
In reply to MP S. Niranjan Reddy’s question, Naidu confirmed that:
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The Centre is aware of the GPS spoofing incident.
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The AAI and DGCA are upgrading cybersecurity frameworks.
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Surveillance and system-hardening measures are being accelerated across India’s airports.
The minister’s admission marks the first official confirmation that India’s aviation infrastructure faced a direct cyber compromise, raising urgent questions about the resilience of national air-traffic systems.