Sabre down globally

[pauly7]

Someone asked what this was a reference to. It may have been to this article from a bit more than a week ago:

Virgin warns managers to cut costs

Hahah maybe someone at Virgin thought the booking system wasn't a customer critical piece of infrastructure and turned it off to save electricity



Breakfast tv news still covering Virgin technical issues this AM. Looks like maybe their immunity from getting any bad publicity is finally ending....?

 

[jpk]

Web-based back-up, eh? I wonder if that basically works on a static data backup from Amadeus, which then logs changes to be synchronised when the main system comes back online. Sounds good until you start considering the stale data risk.

I was thinking last night, as I spent 7 hours waiting at the airport, that a simple db dump like that would help a lot in these situations. The staff know how to do manual checkins, but had a lot of trouble accessing any useful data. I reckon you could have flown anywhere last night during the outage by turning up and saying you were flying to XYZ and they would have put you on the next flight, no questions asked. They just wrote down your name on a sheet of paper and then tried to find you a seat on a flight. Plenty of people got lost in that process and after many hours of waiting had to chase Virgin up again to get on the last flight out.

So much stuff ties into Sabre that once it goes down everything is screwed. Even the flight info screens were wrong, which compounded the problem. A system that allowed them to log pax details when they spoke to someone at the service desk, and then check that they were sorted, would have been very useful I think.

 

[Markmat]

If it is a cloud based solution shouldn't it be configured as an active-active solution, so if one data centre goes down, it automatically goes to another data centre?

 

[Melburnian1]

VA didn't seem to have any major problems today from what I could detect. The reputational damage, however, won't stop so quickly - not that QF is immune from problems with its Amadeus system.