Sabre Outage Affects Airlines, Travel Agents

Sabre said the two-hour outage of its airline reservations systems in the early hours of Aug. 5 to 6 was caused by “an issue with a change associated with a storage refresh in one of our core systems.”

“We worked closely with our technology vendors to address the issue and steps were taken to resolve the matter. We apologize and regret the inconvenience caused,” a company statement said.

The service disruption, which started at about 11:45 p.m. Eastern time, affected both airlines and travel agencies, which were unable to communicate with the affected airline systems. But the effects were felt more keenly in the Far East and Australia because of the timing.

Less affected
Fewer flights in North or South America would have been slated for takeoff during those hours.

But even in those regions, some customers felt the pain.

“Why is there an hour-long line at DIA at midnight, on a Monday?” one JetBlue customer tweeted.

“Operationally, we switched over to manual operations and saw some delays as a result,” a JetBlue spokeswoman said. “Manual operations are our standard operating procedure for instances like these.”

Alaska Airlines tweeted to its customers that Sabre “has had an issue. Pen & paper at work instead.”