Update: This article was updated on May 4. The words "Federal Air" were removed from the third-last paragraph. Federal Air was not affected by the outage. - Ed.
The booking systems of several airlines across the world, including FlySafair, which were brought down recently, have now been restored. This was due to major international airline reservation system, Radixx International, part of the Sabre Group, suffering what they have called a “major technical event”.
The FlySafair website came online again on April 24, but GDS connections have taken longer to restore, only coming online yesterday (April 29). eTicketing was fully reactivated this morning (April 30).
Prior to this, agents were finding FlySafair inventory on the GDS but were unable to generate any vendor locators, as no reservations were being created in the FlySafair system.
The outage started during the early hours of Wednesday morning (April 21). The company confirmed that there had been no data breach and that all its clients around the world had been affected. Regional airline fastjet was also affected.
“The outage was incredibly frustrating, inhibiting our ability to sell any new tickets or make any changes to existing reservations,” says Kirby Gordon, chief marketing officer of FlySafair. “Fortunately, the systems that manage airport administration are separate so there has been no disruption to operations other than that customers are unable to check in online and must do so at the airport.
“We wholly appreciate and share the frustration that this has caused our loyal customers and the agents that support us. Of course it’s also come at a significant cost to FlySafair. We thank everyone for their amazing patience while we got these issues resolved.”
