Indigo Apologises Four Times In A Week: Was 2025 The Year Of Public Apologies?

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

Disrupted flights, appointments missed, weddings delayed... India's Indigo airline caused widespread chaos when it cancelled hundreds of flights across the country, leaving airports overwhelmed and passengers stranded

Since the mayhem started at the beginning of December, Indigo has apologised repeatedly to customers, citing minor technical glitches, the new pilot fatigue rules imposed by the government and seasonal changes, among other reasons. The apologies came right from the top, with the CEO Pieter Elbers taking responsibility, issuing public notices explaining the disruptions and outlining steps to change.

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Customers require accountability from business leadership - a fact of which said leadership is well aware. But is an apology enough?

As we reach the end of the year, we take a look back at 2025 and all the CEOs (and senior management) who publicly apologised for both company failures and their own bad behaviour.

Indigo flight disruptions

The first apology came on day three of the disruptions (December 4, 2025).

"The last two days have seen widespread disruption across IndiGo's network and operations. We extend a heartfelt apology to all our customers and industry stakeholders who have been impacted by these events," the airline said in a statement on X.

Indigo added that it "deeply regrets the inconvenience caused and remains focused on streamlining its operations at the earliest".

The airline then said on December 5,“We deeply apologise and understand how difficult the past few days have been for many of you. While this will not be resolved overnight, we assure you that we are doing everything in our capacity to help you in the meantime and to restore operations at the earliest.” It went on to say that it was taking steps for improvement from the next day onwards.

“We want you to know that you will see incremental progress,” Indigo said.“We will do everything to earn back your trust and the love you've shown us over the past 19 years, and we can't lose it at any cost.”

“Our frontline staff and entire team remain dedicated to restoring normal operations and assisting every customer with care and respect. Thank you for your patience, understanding, and kindness during this difficult time. We will continue to keep you updated on our progress."

Later in the day, CEO Pieter Elbers released his own apology.

"We have experienced severe operational disruptions for the past few days. The crisis continued to aggravate today, December 5, being the most severely impacted day, with the number of cancellations well over a thousand, or more than half the number of our daily flights," he said.

"On behalf of IndiGo, I would like to extend our sincere apologies for the major inconvenience this has caused to many of our customers," Elbers said. He also provided three ways in which the airline would deal with the crisis.

As flight disruptions continued, so did the apologies. The airline again expressed its regret for the disruptions and hardship caused to travellers when it responded to a show-cause notice issued by the Indian civil aviation regulator on December 8.

The latest apology came from Vikram Singh Mehta, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of InterGlobe Aviation Limited (Indigo). He released a video in which he chose to wait before making a statement. He said that the Board prioritised restoring operations over making an apology, but that "now" (i.e., December 10) was the right time for Mehta to speak to the public.

After acknowledging the distress of passengers, the loss they incurred and the missed appointments and connections, he said, "I want to say very simply and very clearly: we are sorry." He said that Indigo "owes answers" to its customers, the government, its shareholders and its employees. "Over the past week, there has been a lot of criticism - some fair, some not. The fair criticism is that the airline let you down," he said.

T100 in Dubai

The T100 is a triathlon event where participants do a 100km race which involves running, biking and swimming. This year's edition, held in Dubai, left much to be desired, with confusion taking the lead.

Riders and runners ended up doing fewer or more laps than required. In the case of the bike races, the participants were blamed since the responsibility of counting their laps fell on them. However, in the case of the runs, the organisation (Professional Triathletes Organisation, PTO) blamed the electronic counter.

Eventually, a winner was crowned, but the whole event was marred by criticism. Marten Van Riel, the reigning T100 World Champion, shared his "extreme disappointment" publicly. He explained the confusion he and fellow athletes faced during the event. He also said he would not have signed the contract to do multiple races for T100 had he known how it would go.

In an interview with Tri247, PTO CEO Sam Renouf apologised for the chaos, saying, "We've spoken to Marten and all the athletes and apologised for the technical problems that occurred during the run in the men's race in Dubai - and we are also sorry for the disruption caused to the fans, media and sponsors who were watching at the event and around the world on TV."

“We take full responsibility for what happened at the end of the run, and we will take the learnings into our next race in Qatar and put in place measures to ensure this doesn't happen again,” he said.

Cloudflare outage

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure which provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, and wide area network services, went down twice in two months-November and December 2025.

The service, which powers more than a fifth of global web traffic, suffered from“internal service degradation”, resulting in connectivity problems across multiple websites, apps and platforms worldwide on November 18 and on December 5. Sites hit included social media platform X, Canva, OpenAI and Spotify.

The first time it happened, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince apologised in a blog post.

"We are sorry for the impact on our customers and on the Internet in general," he said. "Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem, any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today."

At the beginning of the comprehensive post explaining what happened, this is what he said: "This post is an in-depth recount of exactly what happened and what systems and processes failed. It is also the beginning, though not the end, of what we plan to do in order to make sure an outage like this will not happen again."

However, Cloudflare went down again not a month later. Prince has not apologised again.

BBC and Trump

This one isn't a CEO, but we have included it in the list just because of the scale of the trouble.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) is in hot water with US President Donald Trump, who is threatening a $5 billion lawsuit after the broadcaster aired a documentary that spliced together parts of Trump's speech on the day his supporters overran the Capitol in January 2021, making it look as though he had advocated violence, as reported by Reuters.

The BBC has issued a full apology for the documentary, and Director General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness have quit the organisation. It called the editing of the piece "an error of judgement".

In a letter to MPs on Monday, BBC chairman Samir Shah said it accepted that the way Trump's speech was edited in a flagship documentary "did give the impression of a direct call for violent action".

"The BBC would like to apologise for that error of judgement," he added, vowing to reform oversight at the publicly funded broadcaster, among other things, according to Reuters.

Airbus recall

Following the large-scale recall of A320 aircraft, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury issued a public apology.

The aircraft was recalled after an incident in which intense solar radiation was found to potentially corrupt data critical to the aircraft's flight control systems. Airbus said the discovery necessitated urgent action to ensure continued operational safety. This led to widespread flight disruptions across the world.

In a statement posted on LinkedIn, Faury acknowledged the disruptions faced by carriers and passengers. "The fix required on some A320 aircraft has been causing significant logistical challenges and delays," he said.“I want to sincerely apologise to our airline customers and passengers who are impacted now. But we consider that nothing is more important than safety when people fly on one of our Airbus aircraft - like millions do every day."

Qantas data breach

In July this year, Australian airline Qantas revealed that data from 5.7 million customers had been leaked online following a major cyberattack.

The stolen information included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates, the blue-chip Australian company said.

"Qantas is one of a number of companies globally that has had data released by cybercriminals following the airline's cyber incident in early July, where customer data was stolen via a third-party platform," the company said in a statement, adding that specialist cybersecurity experts are investigating the incident to determine the full extent of the data exposed.

“We sincerely apologise for this incident and recognise the uncertainty it has caused,” Qantas said in a statement. The airline added that it has since implemented additional security measures, enhanced staff training, and strengthened system monitoring and threat detection to prevent similar breaches in the future.

US Open incident

At the 2025 US Open, Polish tennis player Kamil Majchrzak attempted to give a signed hat to a young fan named Brock, but a wealthy Polish CEO, Piotr Szczerek, grabbed it instead, sparking widespread backlash online. Following the outrage, Szczerek issued a public apology, admitting he had made a“grave mistake”.

The 50-year-old wrote on social media,“I would like to unequivocally apologise to the boy and his family, as well as all the fans and the player himself.” He added that he had since returned the hat to the child and hoped the gesture had“at least partially repaired the damage that was done,” according to media reports.

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