Parts of Sabre were down for a few hours last night, with the response on social media providing some additional insights beyond the official party line.
Sabre's official statement is:
"The technical issue that impacted some of our airline and travel agent customers has been resolved. Our technology team worked diligently to resolve the issue and we apologize for the inconvenience to our customers and travellers."
No other details are coming out of its Dallas HQ, but the Twittersphere gives an indication that some systems were down for around four hours.
Sabre's official Twitter feed noted the outage at 12.29am UK time/7.29pm EDT and said the problem has been addressed at 3.21am UK/10.21pm EDT.
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This suggests a downtime of three hours. But Southwest's Twitter feed - 2 million followers - first told of "booking errors on [its] website" at 11.15pm UK/6.15pm EDT, more than an hour before Sabre's acknowledgement
Interestingly, it names and shames a Sabre pricing engine as the culprit, specifying that the issue is only related to domestic bookings.
Its "everything is okay" tweet came at 3.33am UK/10.33pm EDT.
Virgin America - c800,000 followers - entered the conversation at 11.48pm UK/6.48pm EDT with mention of website issues, before changing tack slightly an hour or so later with the ugly finger of blame pointing to the reservation system. It announced all was well at 3.27am UK/10.27pm EDT.
The person running the Virgin America social media team might want to remind the people on the ground about sweeping generalisations when responding to customers.
The outage clearly did not impact all airlines using Sabre, unlike its major outage in 2013 which impacted 400 airlines globally.
Other than Southwest and Virgin America, JetBlue is reported to have been hit although there is no mention of it currently on its Twitter feed. Having said that, Australian Aviation found some tweets from JetBlue to a protected account about the problem. It also has emailed confirmation from Virgin Australia that it was involved.
Coverage by Reuters and Bloomberg angles Sabre's downtime in the context of other tech issues suffered by US carriers this year.
Whether or not the business press' interest is in terms of the impact on their readers' share portfolio or travel plans is not clear, but it shows that "travel tech glitches" are now part of the media mainstream.
Related reading from Tnooz:
Getting under the skin of airline disruption (Oct 2016)
British Airways apologises after major check-in outage (Sept 2016)
Delta’s outage is an airline industry wake-up call (Aug 2016)