Air Canada’s global computer system crashes!
A report from the CanWest News Service says that Air Canada experienced flight delays and cancellations after a computer glitch wiped out its check-in system around the globe on Friday morning.
While the country’s largest carrier only cancelled 16 of its more than 600 scheduled flights, hundreds of others were delayed throughout the day.
Air Canada’s staff struggled to check passengers in manually during the outage. It was a process that took at least five minutes a passenger, and created a massive backlog of stranded travellers in Montreal,
The Greater Toronto Airport Authority, which operates the airport, had extra staff at Air Canada’s kiosks to help with crowd control and the lineups for most of the morning.
The check-in system was up and running by midday. Nonetheless, hundreds of frustrated passengers waited in lineups for hours at Pearson not knowing when – or if – they would arrive at their intended destination.
Frequent flyers like Montreal’s Jonathon Dahan, who has “Super Elite” status with the airline, were notified by phone about the situation, but hundreds of others, like Nelson Kraus of Waterloo, Ont., waited in line without any idea of when he might be able to board a flight to Edmonton.
The chaotic situation was exacerbated by a shortage of ground staff to update the stranded passengers about the delays, he said.
“Nobody has come around to talk to us,” Kraus said.
Roger Cumberland of Kenora, Ont., missed his flight to Winnipeg yesterday while he waited in line. When he finally got to the counter three hours later, he says was redirected to another line to rebook his flight.
“They told us we were holding up the line for the people who could make their flight,” he said.
Air Canada was treating the computer glitch as an isolated incident and had no immediate plans to compensate travellers for the delays.
Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the airline, said the glitch was unrelated to its new Polaris reservation system that it is in the process of updated.
The outage was caused by a programming problem that prevented the check-in system from communicating with the reservation system and other customer service functions, like baggage check-in.
Despite the delays, Fitzpatrick said Air Canada aimed to deliver all of its passengers at their intended destinations on Friday.
A Report by The Mole from CanWest
John Alwyn-Jones
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