Chennai, July 19 (Reporter) Flight operations were severely hit at the Chennai airport due to global outage of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform on Friday. Airport sources said operation of at least 20 flights were disrupted following this outage. Several flights of various airlines were cancelled, causing hardship to the passengers. The technical problem started around 1100 hrs and long queues were seen in front of check-in counters and baggage screening points in the airport. Some of the airlines were issuing manual boarding passes and baggages of the passengers were also screened manually, which turned out to be a time consuming process. Some of the airlines had given three options to the passengers, that included cancel the journey and take refund, postpone the journey to tomorrow, or wait till a connecting flight was arranged. One of the passengers, who had come to airport to board a private airliner to Goa said his flight was cancelled due to MS cloud platform outage. His direct flight is scheduled to depart for Goa at 5.30 pm. "I got the message about cancellation of the flight while on my way to the airport. But when I came, I saw that several flights were cancelled", he said. He said the airliner has promised to arrange a connecting flight, enduring a longer journey after a stopover at Hyderabad airport. The flight is likely to take off at 10.30 pm to Hyderabad, from where it will head to Goa. "I will be reaching Goa by 6.00 am tomorrow morning", he said. Airport sources said the global IT outage has affected operations across the country. Booking, check-in, access to boarding passes, and flights are disrupted. Citing reports that Microsoft was working to rectify the outage, the sources said flight operations and services will be normalised once the outage problem was solved...////...