Airlines Suffer Worldwide Delays After Global Booking System Fails (bloomberg.com)

rastos1 writes: Airlines worldwide were forced to delay flights Thursday as a global flight-bookings system operated by Amadeus IT Group SA suffered what the company called a "network issue." Major carriers including British Airways, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Cathay Pacific Airways and Qantas Airways were among those reportedly impacted by the outage. Singapore's Changi airport said via Twitter that a technical issue affecting some operators was delaying the check-in process, with boarding passes having to be issued manually. "Amadeus confirms that, during the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems," the Madrid-based company said in a statement. Technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and services are "gradually being restored," it said.

Comments

SABRE was a classic case study

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

In my software engineering course, back in the grad school, the SABRE airline reservation system was a case study. Supposed to be a text book example of how to implement and mange the life cycle of complex software systems. I still have the book Software Engineering by Shooman.

That would have been 17 Moore's Law generations ago! In human terms, it like looking at the farming methods or weaving techniques or marine navigation procedures or military maneuvers of 1592!

Re:SABRE was a classic case study

[rholtzjr]

I agree, unfortunately by today's standards, the waterfall approach has it's limitations with respect to time to market and R&D costs. SABRE finally did make it away from the mainframe centric architecture (some time in the later 90's) and thus could adopt more modern life cycle management techniques.

On another note, the SABRE system (American Airlines) was in fact a system that was comprised of the core system originated by Eastern Airlines (named System One) back in the late 70's, early 80's. SABRE and System One added functionality to market these two separate systems to travel agencies who previously had to use telephones to call into an airline reservation centers. System One was later branched off of Eastern Airlines into a separate entity under Continental Holding Co. before Eastern went bankrupt in the early 90's and was later sold to Amadeus. SABRE is still SABRE as far as I know, however Amadeus was the original purchase of System One.

And how do I know this? That was my first job that got me started down the path of computers as well as my distaste for COBOL after C was standardized in 89.

There were actually 4 big ones marketed to the travel industry back in the late 80's

PARS (TWA)

SABRE (American)

DatasII (Delta)

System One (Eastern)

There were other airlines that utilized similar system, Pan Am had "Panamac" ( I think), Continental/America West/Alaska Airlines had "Shares".

Re:Time to rewrite this software using Rust?

[thomn8r]

Thank you for this - with the week I'm having, I needed a good belly laugh...

Re:Time to replace

[computational super]

You don't understand the principal rule of managing software projects (according to the MBA's who manage software projects): if anything takes more than a couple of hours to do, it's not worth doing.

Re:Good news.

[computational super]

I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.

All the new word-smith phrases for getting DDOS'd?

[adosch]

Are these airline information systems really all that fragile in this sector? I know we all say that, but I personally don't have a F clue; I'm 100% media driven on this from what I read, consume or read-between-the-lines. I'm hoping someone close to this could chime in or reply...

With any one of us with any moderate amount of IT experience in the trenches and at any level that's support any ops or for-profit system, It's hard to dismiss a generic statement such as network issue. I know management I've worked under in the past at other organizations, private and government, would pre-can some huggable and down-played message like that --- and I totally get it; it's embarrassing on any level for any end-user disruption, but we'll never know why.

With the amount of breaches, DDOS's and what seems like this popular resurrection of using the word 'Hacking' like we are all hoping a Hackers reunion happens with Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie is just nauseating, but a very true reality anymore with the lack of implementation over security practices.

Re:Would cloud hosting have prevented the /. outag

[knightghost]

AWS has had plenty of outages.

Personally I don't think there is any such thing as "technical issue". There are resourcing, risk management, and personnel management issues. I've built systems with the right teams before that could stand anything short of a nuke, and we came in under budget. Honesty and the right people give you results.

Re:Good news.

[TechyImmigrant]

I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.

But putting the servers back to work hosting slashdot seems to have borked the airline booking service.

Re:Good news.

[jafiwam]

SD seems to have lost data. The user interface here looks like it did while they were still futzing with it after the purchase. They lost front end HTML and CSS / Script files it seems like.

Re: Would cloud hosting have prevented the /. outa

[Ogive17]

I've built databases that work flawlessly for a year and stop working when I'm on vacation without explanation. Shit happens sometimes.