UPDATE:
Most recent statement from Amadeus:
"Minimising such incidents and their impact on our customers is very important to Amadeus.
"During the incident, our priority was to return to normal service as quickly as possible; once it closed we focused on identifying the cause and analysing actions we could take to avoid reoccurrence. The cause of the problem appears to be a network component.
"We are continuing to investigate this in detail. Once again, we regret the inconvenience this incident may have caused."
ORIGINAL:
The extent of a significant technology failure at Amadeus yesterday is beginning to unravel, as other systems across the industry are now known to have been affected.
Amadeus is remaining tight-lipped as to what triggered such a major collapse, when an outage which lasted a number of hours managed to hit passenger self check-in and reservation systems, agency bookings as well as airport counter systems.
A post on the Amadeus blog this morning said the incident had been fully resolved, with an apology for the inconvenience. Officials will not disclose the nature and size of the outage.
It is understood that although Amadeus customers were hit by the problems, other GDSs were also impacted as the Amadeus airline IT system ALTEA was involved.
ALTEA currently powers over 100 airlines around the world, including British Airways, Qantas, Iberia and Cathay Pacific.
Although it is an Amadeus-run platform, agencies on other distribution networks such as Sabre and Travelport which were trying to connect to some of the airlines involved were also unable to carry out fare queries or make bookings.
A number of insiders across the GDSs have confirmed that the outage was far bigger than initially thought given that the ALTEA system effectively controls how agencies on other networks connect to airline reservation systems.
NB:Image via Shutterstock.