A glitch in the systems of an international airline reservation service provider caused the cancellation of flights by a Canadian carrier and some in the U.S.
The problem began last night and only this morning did things start to return to normal for Toronto-based Porter Airlines. “System coming back online slowly. Check flyporter.com overnight for flight status. Most flights expected to operate as of now,” a tweet from the airline read early Wednesday morning.
To determine the status of flights, passengers are advised to call 1-888-619-8622 to find out the status of their flights.
Porter, which operates from the Billy Bishop Toronto Island airport, cancelled some 40 departure and arrival flights on Tuesday when its system provider Navitaire had an outage.
Porter tweeted on Tuesday that it “and several other airlines are currently being affected by system wide network outages.”
Navitaire manages bookings for some 50 low-budget flight companies around the world. Its system has been experiencing some problems lately. In 2010 The Register took a look at a 21-hour Navitaire outage suffered by Virgin Blue airlines. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2011 that the two sides came to an out of court settlement on issues that stretched over 11 days.
Navitaire is a wholly-owned division of giant management and technology consulting firm Accenture plc. Accenture has a staff of some 261,000 around the world. Alex Pachetti, the head of Accenture’s media relations, said in an interview Wednesday morning the company is still looking into the source of the problem but the initial word was a supplier suffered “some kind of power outage.”
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that the power failure came from the Minneapolis area.
Navitaire computer services include the New Skies reservation system, a customer loyalty program, a system that links to hotels and car rental agencies, an airline operations management suite, an accounting suite and data analysis capabilities.
Its customers include Air Canada, CanJet Airlines of Halifax, Spirit Airlines of Florida, Air Asia, Air One of Italy and FlyThomasCook of Britain. Not all customers suffered a service problem.
