Amadeus booking software outages smack airports across world

Final update A network failure affecting the Amadeus online booking platform is continuing to delay check-ins for passengers around the world, although the firm won't disclose the cause.

Multiple airlines using the Amadeus reservation system told The Register that passenger check-in and/or airline booking systems went offline around 10.30 BST (0930 UTC) for between about five to 15 minutes. And for some, issues with booking and re-booking flights were still ongoing at the time of publication.

Press handlers for Gatwick, Washington (DC) Reagan International Airport and Changi in Singapore confirmed some of the airlines operating on their runways had been affected by the outage.

A spokeswoman for Amadeus told El Reg:

"During the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems. As a result of the incident, customers experienced disruption to certain services."

The firm was still working to restore service, it said. The "technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and restore services as quickly as possible. That action is ongoing with services gradually being restored."

A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines said:

"We have been experiencing widespread, intermittent issues with several of our applications since around 0430 CT (0930 UTC)," but assured us, "We are not experiencing any major delays to our operation at this time."

A spokesperson for Royal Dutch Airlines said 24 flights had been delayed from Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands as of 1302 UTC due to Amadeus outages. In addition to check-in problems this morning, the airline is currently experiencing problems booking and rebooking passengers.

Norwegian Air, South African Airways, Singapore Airlines and Air France also confirmed issues to El Reg.

Amadeus has suffered from outages before.

Its main data centre is based in Erding, Germany and boasted, "3.9+ million net travel bookings per day (peak) and over 747 million passengers boarded" in 2016. Amadeus' spokeswoman declined to say whether the firm had experienced any issues at the data centre.

The spokeswoman declined to share further details, merely noting "Amadeus regrets any inconvenience caused to customers." ®

Updated to add at 1511 UTC

Amadeus said it "can confirm that our systems are recovered and are now functioning normally".

Updated to add at 1717 UTC

“The incident was related to our internal infrastructure. It was triggered by an issue in a faulty switch during network maintenance. The incident was not related to any security issue,” a spokesperson for Amadeus told us.