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Westjet Has Computer Problems


deicer

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A mea culpa from WJ's CEO to a guest inconvenienced yesterday.

One has to give credit to WJ. When they screw up, they quickly and publicly acknowledge when it's their fault. That's refreshing, and part of their brand, personality and promise.

I can think of a number of airlines that never admit to screwing up, including one I flew on recently to SFO.

No matter what happens, it's always someone else's fault.

It becomes a little tiresome after a while and it rings hollow when they say they "appreciate my business". It's pretty obvious they don't.

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Apologies for the flight disruption. We have had a major system outage in our Western data centre and have taken a 30-minute system delay as we failed over to our backup location. Failures of this nature are rare but they happen. Our IT and infrastructure partners are working diligently to reset the systems. At WestJet we are very proud of our on-time performance and reliability. Nevertheless, we failed to measure up tonight and I offer our sincere apologies. Thanks for your business.

Regards

G. Saretsky

President & CEO

WestJet

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Yup. the had a computer problem, admitted they had a computer problem, then took hours to fail over a critical operational system. operational systems should have operational backups in short order.

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  • 5 years later...

Oct 28, 2017.

The problems appear to have returned.

Delays anticipated as WestJet hit by 'significant' IT outage

Check-ins, reservation systems and phone lines all affected by Saturday morning outage

CBC NewsPosted: Oct 28, 2017 10:56 AM MT Last Updated: Oct 28, 2017 11:23 AM MT

WestJet says it anticipates delays as it deals with an IT outage that's affecting multiple systems.

WestJet says it anticipates delays as it deals with an IT outage that's affecting multiple systems. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)

WestJet says it's experiencing a "significant" IT outage that's impacting everything from reservations to check-ins.

"We anticipate potential flight delays and encourage guests to check the status of their flights prior to leaving for the airport," spokesperson Lauren Stewart said in an emailed statement.

The Calgary-based company said the outage is affecting a number of systems, including check-in, reservations and its phone lines. 

There are no reports of delayed flights out of Calgary at this time.

WestJet said it would be providing updates on its Facebook and Twitter pages. 

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On 10/29/2017 at 1:54 AM, Super 80 said:

Accurately simulating IT failure and fail-over scenarios is extremely difficult.

we do it at least twice a year.  full failover to backup systems and run like that for a day then revert back.

 

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It always works when we tested it too.

We have had two serious outages in the last five years, in both cases the fail-over occurred perfectly but external issues, human and physical prevented end-points from communicating with the redundant systems.

Both outages were caused by fires that destroyed beyond the WAN telecom infrastructure, in the more recent outage a security vendor decided on the spot that all the end-points hitting a cloud-based server for the updated configuration was a denial of service attack. Just a guy sitting at a desk in Phoenix at midnight saw a barrage of geographically diverse IP addresses start hitting the server and decided it was malicious.

The one prior to that a catastrophic fire at a major telecommunication facility took out all three fibre providers in the region and the backhaul to the wireless link so while the redundant site was whirring away as configured nobody at head office could connect to it and couldn't for the better part of 48 hours.

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