Update: Navitaire apparently took the blame for the reservations system outage that hit Spirit Airlines earlier today, the day before Thanksgiving.
Navitaire, which hosts Spirit Airlines on the Navitaire New Skies platform, tied the incident to a server problem at Navitaire.
The following is Navitaire's statement:
"The server issue at Navitaire that required maintenance and appears to have caused the outage of the reservations system at Spirit has been resolved and the system is up and running. We regret any inconvenience that this has caused for Spirit’s passengers in the interim."
The original story follows:
Travelers trying to access the Spirit Airlines website are having no luck this morning as the Thanksgiving holiday travel stampede is well under way.
The website homepage states: "Please stand by... we're working on it. We are currently upgrading our systems to better serve your needs in the future. We thank you for your patience during this time and hope to see you back real soon. Here's an image of the page:
The Detroit Free Press reports that the airline's reservation system crashed, that passengers are massing in long lines at Detroit Metro Airport and that Spirit personnel are manually checking in passengers.
The system crash is nationwide for Spirit, according to other reports, and manual check-ins with Spirit staff hand-writing boarding passes are taking place at various airports across the country.
For passengers who missed flights because of the outage, Spirit is reportedly trying to accommodate them on other airlines or is offering refunds.
So far there is no word on the cause of the glitch or an estimate as to when the reservations system will be up.
The Spirit Airlines reservations system is hosted on the Navitaire New Skies platform, according to a 2008 Travel Agent Central story.