United Airlines: Computers coming back online

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

HERBERT G. McCANN

CHICAGO (AP) - United Airlines passengers across the country were stranded after a computer crash grounded flights for hours Friday night.

The airline announced on Twitter shortly after 1 a.m. CDT Saturday that its computer systems were up and running, about five hours after the systems went down. The airline said it was in the process of resuming operations. Some passengers had to stay the night in the cities where they had been stranded or were waiting in terminals filled with people wanting to get on flights.

United did not say what caused the computer issue or how many passengers or flights were affected. The airline did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

As a result of the outage, long lines of passengers formed at airports in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago.

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110618/D9NU4PO01.html

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Passengers wait at the United Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, Friday, June 17, 2011. Thousands of flyers were stranded in airports across the country when United Airlines computers crashed grounding flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Jason Redmond)

[Corruption Winz]

1. Jerry Seinfeld: What's the deal, with airline computers crashing? Must be the hard driving..

[cliffordu]

2. Hmm.....FEDEX was down the other day for a couple of hours, too.

systemwide - just dead.

[dogmoma56]

3. sounds like a hack.. dry run for a total black out..??

:hide:

[eagertolearn]

4. Great....on my way to the Denver airport right now. United has been having enough

Problems without this happening. Hours of delays, changing gates several times. What happened to the good old days of flying?

[bluevoter4life]

5. I find it unfathomable

That a company as large as United (or most major airlines for that matter) seem to only have one primary computer system and no back-ups to prevent this exact thing from happening. USAirways had a similar issue earlier in the week themselves.

[ccinamon]

6. the airlines thought it was "cheaper" and "better" to outsource

their reservation systems...put hundreds of programmers and computer operators out of work.