Incheon Airport Check-in System Down for 12 Hours…38 Flights Delayed, 1,200 Passengers Stranded

A communications failure in a global airline service network at Incheon International Airport caused flight delays and thousands of passengers to experience severe congestion.

According to Incheon International Airport Corporation on the 30th, a communication disruption occurred around 4:30 a.m. that day in the network connecting Incheon Airport's check-in counters to airline computer systems. Due to this failure, ticketing and boarding procedures at a total of 13 airlines—8 airlines at Terminal 1 and 5 airlines at Terminal 2—were intermittently suspended or completely shut down.

The disruption was particularly acute as ticketing operations at major airlines including China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, and Air China virtually ceased entirely. Staff responded by manually issuing boarding passes to some passengers with imminent departures, but this proved insufficient to handle the long lines of waiting travelers.

In the process, check-in procedures for approximately 1,200 passengers were delayed, and a total of 38 flights saw their departures postponed. With connecting schedules disrupted and protests from passengers with imminent departures, the area around the check-in counters descended into major chaos.

The corporation said it fully restored communications around 5 p.m., approximately 12 hours after the failure began. The outage is believed to have originated from instability in the global network of U.S.-based ARINC, which is commonly used by all airlines. An investigation into the exact cause, including whether external intrusions such as hacking occurred, is currently underway.