According to reports from Russia Today a huge outage in the Sabre airline reservation system overnight has been labelled as the cause of recent worldwide flight delays. The IBM system went down at 05:20 GMT (12:20am ET) on Tuesday morning and the company confirmed the outage stating that its team was working on fixing the situation. Within 2 hours they had managed to fix the system and get it back online again but not at the expense of causing delays and causing temporary mayhem to the air travel industry.
Sabre is used by many airlines all over the world including Alaska Airlines, American, Cathay Pacific, Frontier, Jet Blue, LAN, Quantas, United, Virgin America and Virgin Australia. Some airports were exempt from the problems as they do not use the Sabre system while affected Airlines and Airports resorted to manual checking-in processes in order to get flights out as close to on-time as possible but of there were inevitable delays to the check-in process for many flying with any of the affected airlines.
Image courtesy of IBM
