IT system outage delays United flights

04.01.2006
A four-hour computer system outage affecting passenger ticketing, baggage check-in and boarding pass printing caused delays of United Air Lines Inc. flights across the country Tuesday.

Jeff Green, a spokesman for Chicago-based United, a unit of UAL Corp., Wednesday confirmed that the system outage affected the airline's operations from about 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Central time, Tuesday, but he said he didn't know if the specific cause of the problem was related to hardware, software or something else.

"We don't have that information," Green said.

The computer system is critical to the airline's operations, he said. "We use it for passenger processing," said Green, explaining that it supports ticketing, baggage check-in and boarding pass creation. "Our personnel weren't able to do any of that" during the outage, which caused delays of about one hour for about 150 flights, he added.

Some residual flight delays continued Wednesday, but they could also have been related to weather problems in the East and Midwest, he said.

A spokeswoman for New York-based Cendant Corp., which partners with IBM and others to provide IT services to United, said Wednesday that she had no additional details on what caused the airline's IT system problems. "The root cause is still being investigated by IBM and our engineering teams," she said.