A little technology fight is breaking out in Australia as Virgin Blue suffered a catastrophic reservation systems failure.
On Sunday and Monday a 21-hour outage of the New Skies Reservation system, hosted at Navitaire’s Sydney data centre, caused mass delays Virgin Blue’s customers and services as the airline reverted to a manual system. In addition, the airline has had to pay accommodation costs for some customers, with the eventual costs being a lot more.
We’ve all run into Navitaire’s “wonderful” reservation system at some point (Virgin Blue, Jetstar, RyanAir are a few of their victims), and it’s not the greatest lump of softwarw around.
Already the blame game is beginning with NetApp saying “not our fault”, Texas Memory Systems is working “non-stop” (more than the airlines) and Accenture at the root of all this who owns Navitare.
Navitaire’s states it tried to “repair the device” and this attempt delayed the “cutover to a contingency hardware platform.”
With a cutover of 21 hours, and the failure of disaster recovery procedures, it’s near enough farcical – least of all for the customers and operations teams who are forced back to manual systems to get them going again – which promptly failed after some use (and has now recovered)
Virgin Blue on the other had are very annoyed – to the point they’re considering legal action.
It’s amazing how much we trust technology to “just work”. However, if there is just one glitch, the house of cards comes tumbling down quickly – this is just an example of it.
A more techincal analysis can be found at The Register
