Many Sabre clients were unable to connect to its airline reservation system for about two hours, causing several airlines to have to manually check in passengers for domestic and international flights.
In some cases, airlines couldn't tell if passengers had checked in already online, and gate agents had to handwrite boarding passes.
According to a company statement sent to Tnooz:
The systems have been restored and everyone is now able to connect to Sabre. We apologise and regret the inconvenience caused.
As many as 400 airlines were affected for a period of time, including Alaska Airlines, American, Frontier, Jet Blue, LAN, Virgin America, and Virgin Australia.
The system took a siesta around 1:40pm Sydney local time, according to Virgin Australia. According to American Airlines, the outage started at 11:45pm US Eastern time. Monitoring service Flight Radar reported multiple flight delays. Airline websites couldn't take reservations.
No clear reason has yet been given for the failure.
The crash comes as especially bad timing for Virgin Australia. Because of the outage, it offered compensation for passengers who chose not to show up for flights today during prime afternoon traffic time.
The carrier moved to Sabre's GDS and its SabreSonic point-of-sale system in January. The glitch came a day after the airline warned it will record a loss of up to $110 million this year, of which it attributed $50 million to revenue lost because of GDS implementation problems. Virgin Australia said it had made the switch as a precaution to replace the Navitaire booking system that once went offline for 11 days.
NB: Image of handwritten boarding pass courtesy of Paulie Abb.