Did you or someone you know get stuck in United’s network outage yesterday afternoon? Here’s United’s official response to TravelSkills about the incident:
United’s operations are running normally today following yesterday’s network outage. The outage lasted approximately two hours, and as a result we experienced 580 delays and nine cancellations. (8 yesterday, 1 residual today). The outage was caused when a piece of communication equipment in one of our data centers failed and disabled communications with our airports and web site. We have fully redundant systems and we are working with the manufacturers to determine why the backup equipment did not work as it was supposed to.
As you may have seen, when United’s network went down, social media and news channels squealed about hours-long waits, hand-written boarding passes, and armies of angry passengers vowing “I’ll never fly United again!”
But just how bad was it out there? In my experience, network outages do happen (at all airlines), and thankfully not all that frequently. To me, this outage was equivalent to a bad storm hitting a major hub– yes, some people were late, but everyone eventually got to their home or hotel. United played nice by offering waivers for travelers who had to change plans because of it. But I don’t think it was the complete and total meltdown as portrayed by many media outlets.
Or was it? Do travelers and the media tend to overreact to events like this? Or was the network outage indicative of deeper problems at United? Please leave your comments below.
Recent posts in TravelSkills:
- Early Thanksgiving & Christmas fare sale. Act fast!
- United reveals new routes for Boeing 787 Dreamliner
- United revamps popular PS flights to New York City
- Singapore Airlines brings the Airbus A380 to SFO!
Subscribe to TravelSkills via e-mail!
*****
Chris —
Thanks. Glad to be home too… Forgot to mention that the later UA > SFO flt arrived 20 mins. ahead of us. Oy vey!
Hey Don! Thanks for the details. Sounds pretty awful, but I’m glad you got home! I’m also glad I was not flying on the day of the outage! –chris
I had a confirmed FC upgrade on UA 1535 dep. SEA 6:21 PM arr. SFO 8:26 PM on 8/29.
First heard about the delay around 1:00 PDT when I was trying to find my boarding pass on my smartphone and I wasn’t getting into united.com. When I was done with my meeting 30 minutes later, I got on my laptop and same results. Called United’s Web help line and was told about the outage.
Because my flight wasn’t for another 5 hours, I didn’t rush to the airport but was a bit anxious. Arrived at 4:00 PM and the UA check in counter was DEAD. Checked right in and the agent said, “Glad you weren’t here two hours ago.” Went straight through security which was equally dead.
Finally got to my gate area and had a beer while catching up on work. Finally went over to the assigned gate around 5:30 in advance of boarding. The gate info said flt was on time, but I overheard the gate agent say something about 7:50. I asked the gate agent and sure enough, the flt was delayed coming in from IAH due to the “network outage” and we had a new departure time.
Killed more time in the gate area until we boarded and then we sat at the gate until push-back around 8:30. Pilot came on and said he’d try his best to get to SFO as fast as he could because there were passengers with connections.
Touched down around 10:15, sat on the apron for 15 mins while other flts landed went to the gate area and sat for 30 mins because our gate was occupied. Finally, they assigned us to another gate but had to wait another 10 mins while the plane at the gate was backed out. The pilot came on and was as animated as I have ever heard a Captain, apologizing for the THIRD gate assignment and “…we’ll get you in here as soon as they move the damn metal!” Was also told that two red-coats (customer service personnel) would be available at gate for assistance with connections.
No one was there to operate the jetway; had to wait another 10 mins standing with our bags while they found an operator. The guy behind me was supposed to get on a flt to Sydney, but it departed while we were waiting for the operator. Finally off the plane around 11:20. No red-coats; gate agents had no idea what was going on. Came in at gate 84 in Terminal 3, right across from the UA customer service desk; 200 people in line with 3 agents working.
SFO was my final destination so I was just happy to get my bag and get the heck home, but what a cluster for all those pax who missed connections.
It’s a part of flying in post-9/11, but what makes me mad is that the world’s largest airline’s computers had such a catastrophic FAIL. I guess that’s why I fall somewhere in between “overreaction” and “get used to it.” It wasn’t just the Website or check in, it also extended to flight manifests, maintenance paperwork, and weight-balance calculations. I guess they just re-booted the entire system but 90 mins of down-time during the day equals cluster.
I think passengers and the media DO tend to over react in these situations. It’s become a sport to complain about the airlines, the IRS, and a few other industries. I travel A LOT with United and overall I’ve been happy and satisfied. The problem they have now is that the merger HAS created a lot of problems so every little problem gets amplified when it happens.