Top airlines reservation system crashes briefly

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http://www.businesstoday.com/techpages/sabre02222000.htm

Top airline reservation system crashes briefly Reuters

Tuesday, February 22, 2000

DALLAS - 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.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), February 22, 2000

Answers

The really important systems need primed 'n ready back-ups.

Thank you, Homer, for your continuing posting of interesting computer failure articles.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 22, 2000.


This DOES happen occasionally, according to my clients, who effectively travle for a living.

Chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), February 22, 2000.


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