Major airline delays worldwide after reservation system crashes

Flights at MIA delayed as check-in is being carried out manually

6 August 2013, 12:00am
by Staff Reporter

1 min read

Passengers at the Malta International Airport are not the only ones facing flight delays as the Sabre airline reservation system went down at 5:20am today.

Sabre is a reservation system used by many carriers. Some two hours after the outage was reported, Sabre announced that it was bringing the system back online. The system has now been restored and is slowly returning to normal.

A spokesperson for Air Malta confirmed the outage had affected passengers leaving from Malta as well. Because the system was done, MIA had to switch to a manual check-in process.

"As a result, the check-in process may take longer than expected but we are doing our best to minimise delays as much as possible," the spokesman said.

Sabre is used by more than 400 airlines worldwide.

"Air Malta's IT and operations teams worked together to minimise inconveniences to passengers. The airline's IT team worked with Sabre to resolve this problem whilst our operations team reverted to a manual flight check-in process. Due to this outage the check-in process may take longer than usual and there may be some delays to flights today. Air Malta regrets any inconvenience caused to clients due to
circumstances beyond its control," national airline Air Malta said in a statement.

More from Staff Reporter

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Probably most of the staff of airlines had to play Solitaire with a deck of cards!!!

Joseph MELI •

After the recent delay at MIA, caused by another computer glitch effecting check-in I enquired of MIA (still awaiting an acknowledgment let alone an actual answer to such ) if,as a contingency plan, check-in staff had been trained in manual check-in procedures and moreover ,crucially had in their possession the necesary wherewithal to implement such a manual check-in procedure(such as boarding passes ,seat allocation for the aeroplane seating plans for the flight ,manual issuing of such and recording of passenger names and baggage weights etc.?).As clearly on the previous occasion these were not in place and staff were totally unprepared(and untrained) for this eventuality!