London: More than 100 airports around the world, including London's Heathrow and Gatwick, Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Changi in Singapore and Washington DC's Reagan, suffered major disruption on Thursday after their computer check-in systems crashed.
The outage was reported when a programme, known as Altea and developed by a company called Amadeus, encountered problems.
However, the issue was soon resolved. The company called it a 'network issue' and said in a statement:
"Amadeus can confirm that our systems are recovered and are now functioning normally. During the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems. As a result of the incident, customers experienced disruption to certain services. Our technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and mitigate against the impact on customers. Amadeus regrets any inconvenience caused to customers."
Our systems are recovered and are now functioning normally. Full statement: https://t.co/EjQfgH4BzO
— Amadeus IT Group (@AmadeusITGroup) September 28, 2017
Altea helps airlines manage customer reservation. This includes tagging luggage and issuing boarding passes. It is said to be used by more than 100 airlines, including British Airways, Lufthansa, Thai Airways and Air France.
As the software is used by the airlines and not by airports, the problem spread fast across the world.
Facing chaos and delays, many passengers took to social media to complain and tweeted pictures of the long lines at airports.
@Gatwick_Airport @CDG @airfrance as a passenger I wish you would care and all work hand in hand for a great passenger journey pic.twitter.com/rm5pkloWQy
— Cornelia Altrichter (@c_altrichter) September 28, 2017
@British_Airways are you having problems? Impossible to log in and check in online! #BAFail pic.twitter.com/6H9E8Cf8hd
— Morten Petersen (@_mortenp) September 28, 2017
After 10 min of standing on queue, the @Lufthansa system in the whole Frankfurt airport stops working. Fun pic.twitter.com/5dmPpPSolg
— NG | Artorias (@ArtoriasSSB) September 28, 2017
Apparently @qatarairways system is down at @Melair . Hopefully not much delay pic.twitter.com/6apnLWt0Mk
— Osama Nasir (@osamanasir) September 28, 2017
Many airlines like British Airways, Southwest Airlines, Qatar Airways and Qantas replied to the beleaguered travelers and tried to pacify them.
Hi Jon, along with many other airlines, we are experiencing technical issues with our online booking and reservations systems. 1/2
— British Airways (@British_Airways) September 28, 2017
100 airlines with a variety of IT systems. However, we're delighted your booking is now correct. We're sorry for any inconvenience. 2/2 ^Liz
— British Airways (@British_Airways) September 28, 2017
As there's no power at the airport, we have limited flights getting in. We're doing the best we can with the resources available. ^SO
— Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) September 28, 2017
1/2 We're sorry for the hassle Paul. A global system outage affecting many airlines has since been restored and operating
— Qantas (@Qantas) September 28, 2017
Hi, there was an unplanned network wide outage of the operating system worldwide, which resulted to that. However, it's back on track. 1/2.
— Qatar Airways (@qatarairways) September 28, 2017
