Yesterday, at the beginning of one of the busiest air travel periods in the US, Spirit Airlines' reservation system and web site suffered an outage for several hours. Spirit's reservation system and web site are hosted by Navitaire on its New Skies platform.
As you may recall, Virgin Blue in Australia which also has its reservation system hosted by Navitaire, suffered a major outage in September that required a rebuilding of its system in October. Irish Ryanair also had a similar, but less severe, Navitaire-related reservation and web site outage in September as well.
Virgin Blue is looking at recovering up to $A20 million dollars from Navitaire because of the losses it says it suffered.
According to this story at WDIV-TV in Detroit, Spirit Airlines' outage began very late Tuesday night. While the outage lasted until Wednesday mid-morning, luckily no flights had to be canceled.
A statement by Navitaire said:
"Overnight, a server at Navitaire required maintenance and this appears to have caused the outage of the reservations system that we maintain for Spirit. This has now been resolved and the system is up and running. We worked with the client to resolve the situation and support them with their operations in the interim, and we regret any inconvenience that this has caused for Spirit’s passengers."
An issue with a solid state storage device was reportedly the cause of Virgin Blue's problems. There has been no explanation given of the Ryanair outage.
Navitaire is a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
