United flights grounded due to systems black-out

United Airlines suffered a near total outage of its passenger reservation system on Tuesday.


The outage blacked out everything online for about two hours from about 15:00hrs, finally coming back online at about 17:20 EST, said USA Today.


The technological nightmare also prevented passengers boarding aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration held all flights destined for Houston, Newark and San Francisco at their departure airports.


 


FlightAware.com and USA today pointed to United "SHARES" online reservation system as a key component of the tech failure.  Both sources say that the system, which United adopted from Continental Airlines, was subject to "significant" glitches in March following the merger of the two carriers.
 



Numerous critics and experts have pointed to the merger as the source of systems and equipment malfunctions that have plagued the United this year. The airline has suffered several in-flight incidents relating to possible equipment failure.


 

Thursday, August 30, 2012

• PRINT
• SEND TO A FRIEND