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United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage
From reader Peter McDermott comes word of a computer outage with effects to dwarf those of the one that stranded thousands of US Airways passengers last week. This time, it's United Airlines' systems that are out of commission and unable to handle passenger reservations, leaving passengers stranded all over the U.S. According to Peter, experiencing the resultant delays first-hand at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., United planes are being sent on — along with their passengers' luggage — to the cities from which they're to leave tomorrow morning, in anticipation of the computer system being fixed in the interim.
Are the passengers getting their luggage shipped in the planes and not allowed to board or what's happening? As far as I know sending a plane with luggage for a passenger that hasn't boarded is against FAA rules.
Confusion...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Instead of getting an AI that just wants to outright kill us all, we got one that just wants to fuck with us...
Airline mainframe of the size of an United are usually separated in several backends. One for the Reservation/Inventory & Ticketing and Scheduling, another for the OPS, check In, Weight and balance. Sometiems even more mainframe. Basically when you "book" you add your own PNR (passenger Name Recvord) to the invetory system thru the reservation system, this can happens directly with the airline own system, or a GDS system (think travel agency using Amadeus / Sabre), once the sales is done the ticketing system (for the own airline ticket stocks / travel agency use IATA stocks) generate the ticket, in the past paper ticket, nowaday mostly etickets. After that shortly before departure (24h to 28h) the RES system send the PNL (passenger Name List) to the GHS (groudn Handler system, can also be the airline own check in system, but can be a special firm asked to do it, airport systems, or a partner airline, for example United is checked-in by Lufthansa in Frankfurt, and vice versa the Check in is done by United for Lufthansa in the US) that GH system usually when it receives the PNL get the ticket ferom the ticketing database (either directly thru an itnern link, or using edifact message , namely the TKCREQ ground handling message).
The reason I doubt this was the RES system, is that this would mean there would be *NO SALES* or *BOOKING* if it weas the RES system, where as flight would continueb to operate for 24h about. Whereas here the flight stopperd, but nothing is said about sales stopping. Therefore I can see a number of sub system stopping working : WAB, but for those usually you can have load sheets as work around, and unless the UA agent are kept dumb, they have that as work around. That could be MES , messaging, where the message (PNL & Edifact) don't go reach the GH place, but it is doubtful as this would mean that the glitch was yesterday.
That leaves the check in system glitching , or the OPS system (the one handling the scheduled departure of flights). Seeing that the picture is a picture of a MANUAL boarding pass , I tend to think this was the check in system which failed. Anotehr evidence that this is the CHeck in of UA which failed and not the RES system , si that other origin which are NOT ground handled by UA , like FRA are working. Only the local check in from UA seems to be impacted.
There are naturally work around that for a short time (manual boarding pass, paper PNL and check list) but those are short stop gp measure. I can imagine UA sending pax in hotel and getting this corrected / solved during the night.
That was a little nitpick : RES from UA did not break, almost certainly CKI from UA broke (check in). That is as much a difference as Amazon warehouse and sales breaking , or their delivery service breaking. That said for the stranded Pax : no difference probably.
Just you watch. They will admit to being hacked, and then tack on a $25 per seat "Digital Ticket Security Initiative" fee.
A few years back Northwest was taken offline for few days when a road crew accidentally dug into an unmarked fiber line. So maybe they cant do it digitally, but they can easily find maps of where the fiber is buried...
This regularly happens to Virgin in Australia.
Passengers getting fucked by Virgin?
Is this some sort of "in Soviet Russia" joke?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
At what point do you stop thinking of this as a glitch and start thinking of it as an attack?
And if it is a cause of war, then how are you sure you were not spoofed?
Hm... if you want to get paranoid, perhaps Homeland Security requested some additional access rights on the airlines' computer systems and managed to foul up whatever they touched in the process?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Absolutely no chance this is a "Windoze" problem.
This will be a problem with a mainframe, probably but not necessarily software.
It's hard to say until after the dust has settled. It could also be a network configuration issue. I observed a similar problem on Icelandair some weeks ago at Seattle.
The check-in terminals just would not work, or worked, but hideously slowly. Since I was first to check in (at the desk before it opened), they got me checked in on all four flights, and even got my bag tagged properly to my destination, but it took 15-ish minutes. They managed a few more passengers before they gave up or the system failed completely. Opening 2 more check-in desks had not helped, and they did not have time to spend 15 minutes per check-in for a full 757. Most of the almost 200 people subsequently in the departure lounge thus had no boarding pass, and were not checked to any connecting flights. I have no idea what their luggage status was.
The story volunteered by one of the technical support persons, two of whom were already there during my lengthy check-in, was that it was a network configuration issue with the terminals (i.e. Windows or their LAN), but he was busy enough that nobody bothered him for further details. No other airlines were affected, as far as I know. I can imagine a network configuration issue completely borking processes for a larger airline, especially if it was a globally propagated routing screw-up or similar.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm no United fan, but what would you have them do? Cascade the delays for two days and impact 600 customers instead of the 99 already impacted? Sucks for you of course, but I'm not sure there was a better option (assuming there wasn't alternative metal sitting around unused -- which is unlikely).
I was checking on a flight this morning and according to United's site it left a minute late. In reality it was almost an hour.
While United didn't have the delay listed, both flightstats and flightaware did. So the information is available, United just doesn't want to share it with anyone. - Or do they use their own website, to prove your flight was on time?