IT problems struck flights at two oneworld Alliance member airlines this week, leading to delays and flight cancellations.
Network equipment connecting internal and external systems at Japan Airlines (JAL) malfunctioned early on Dec. 26 after “receiving a large amount of data from an external source,” the company said.
Delays due to too much traffic
The description suggests it may have been hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“The cause of the failure and the impact range of the system issues have been identified, and the system has been restored,” it said in the last of a series of statements recounting its analysis of the incident.
JAL emphasized that there was “no customer data leakage or virus damage” and no threat to flight safety. It was, however, forced to temporarily suspend services including last-minute upgrades and access to standby seats.
The company said that 71 flights were delayed by half an hour or more as a result of the incident, with the longest delay being just over four hours. It cancelled four flights on Thursday, with a fifth cancellation expected on Friday.
Earlier in the week, American Airlines was forced to ground flights for up to an hour on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest travel days of the year.
American asked US Federal Aviation Administration to issue a “nationwide groundstop” at 6:50 am Eastern Time on Tuesday, preventing any of its aircraft from flying. The advisory was lifted an hour later.
Vendor technology issue
The airline blamed the problems on a “vendor technology issue” in a message sent from its official X/Twitter account. The issue was in networking equipment managed by DXC Technologies, according to an American Airlines statement cited by several news outlets.
Neither DXC nor American immediately responded to our requests for comment.
American has been working with DXC to modernize mainframe systems using a devops approach, according to a blog post by its in-house technology team.
In a separate modernization initiative, it also transformed its analytics tools, so it should be well placed to evaluate the consequences of Tuesday morning’s outage.
The disruptions were relatively minor compared to the thousands of Southwest Airlines flights cancelled over a ten-day period at the end of 2022, when disruptions due to bad weather triggered the collapse of IT systems at a time when many Americans were travelling for the holidays.
Lauren Woods, who took over as Southwest’s CIO just two months after the incident, described her new role euphemistically as an “accelerated learning opportunity” in an interview with CIO.com earlier this year.
Source:: Network World