Fergie's Tech Blog

Air Canada Reservations Glitch Creates Delays for 96k Passengers

Matt Hartley and Erika Beauchesne write in The Globe and Mail:

Air Canada officials spent Friday trying to find the cause of a massive network failure that brought down the company's reservation system, grounding flights and delaying thousands of weekend travellers at airports across Canada and around the world.

Around 4 a.m., Air Canada's operations ground to a halt when its central reservation system experienced a communication error with computer systems at Canadian airports. It was several hours before the airline was able to rectify the problem, resulting in the cancellation of eight round-trip flights and lengthy delays for an estimated 96,000 passengers as employees had to process boarding passes manually.

Although Air Canada pegged the average delay at 40 minutes, many travellers said they were left waiting for hours. By Friday afternoon, some were still languishing in lineups, while Air Canada struggled to expedite the backlog, predicting everyone would reach their destinations before the day was over. Meanwhile, company officials tried to figure out what went wrong.

posted by Fergie @ 11/16/2007 11:02:00 PM