Travelers Stranded After Another United Airlines Computer Outage

By Chuck Sudo in News on Nov 15, 2012 9:20PM

A United Airlines flight is shown in its seemingly normal status these days—delayed. (Photo Credit: Lucy Rendler-Kaplan)

United Airlines said travel on the nation’s largest airline is working its way back to normal after a computer outage this morning delayed flights. The outage lasted for nearly two hours and affected nearly half of the flights on United’s main network.

Today’s outage marks United’s third computer outage since June and has had technology problems since it switched to a passenger information computer system previously used by Continental Airlines. (United and Continental merged in 2010.) Forget buying new planes: maybe it’s time for United to upgrade its computer network, which we’re imagining is a series of Tandy TRS 80s in a poorly ventilated warehouse outside of O’Hare Airport. The problems began around 9 a.m. Eastern Time, with airports across the country reporting delays of two hours or more on United flights.

United acknowledged the outage on its Twitter feed and also let passengers know when the computers were back online, so we at least know there’s someone at United who can work a smartphone. United Continental Holdings CEO Jeff Smisek said three weeks ago the previous two outages cost the airline a “significant” amount of money, and acknowledged their inability to keep the network online and competing airlines may be hurting them.

“We recognize that some of our customers chose to fly other airlines during the summer when our operational performance degraded, just like when your preferred road to work undergoes construction, you might choose to take a detour unti the road gets repaired,” he said Oct. 25. “Well the road is repaired, with our operations back on track, our unmatched global network and our industry leading product offerings, we hope to earn back those customers who took a detour and we expect to attract new customers as well.”