[They're just having no luck these days..]

DALLAS (Reuters) - The world's No. 1 computerized airline reservations system went down for about two hours on Tuesday morning, making life miserable for airlines, travel agencies and the traveling public. Sabre Holdings Corp. said travel agencies and major airlines, including American Airlines and US Airways, were unable to access its reservation computers during the crash.

Sabre, based in Fort Worth, Texas, said it started having problems at about 9 a.m. (1500 GMT) with two network backbone routers, computers that handle massive amounts of data that run through its private Internet-based system to its data center in Tulsa, Okla.

The computer network was back on its feet at 11 a.m. (1700 GMT) and Sabre began restoring service to customers, with nearly all of them back on-line within the hour, a company spokeswoman said.

Sabre did not yet know what caused the router problem, spokeswoman Theda Page Whitehead said. "That is still under investigation," she told Reuters.

Sabre, which is to be spun off next month by American Airlines' parent company AMR Corp., handles more than 400 million bookings each year, or about 40 percent of all air travel reservations made in the world.

It provides reservation systems to travel agencies and corporations and runs the on-line consumer booking service Travelocity.com. Sabre also provides computer systems for airlines, airports and other travel-related companies that do not want to set up or upgrade their own systems.

http://news.excite.com/news/r/000222/14/tech-sabre

-- Antoine Neron (metis@2000now.org), February 22, 2000

Answers

Antoine, here's another news brief. Notice how they say problems were largely [not completely] corrected two hours later.....

Business News Briefs, Wednesday, February 23, 2000 By the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Computer glitch trips airlines

Several airlines, including US Airways and American, yesterday were forced to cancel some flights and delay others due to problems with the Sabre computer system. In addition, some travel agencies were unable to access the system for ticket reservations. The problems began around 10 a.m. and were largely corrected two hours later, according to a spokeswoman for Sabre Holdings Corp. of Dallas/Ft. Worth, which operates the computer network.

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pennsylvania

http://www.post- gazette.com/businessnews/20000223bizbiz4.asp

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 28, 2000.