Accenture subsidiary blamed for Virgin Blue outage

By Liz Tay on Sep 27, 2010 11:05 AM
Filed under Strategy

Outsourced IT grounds thousands of passengers.

Virgin Blue has blamed IT outsourcer Navitaire for a reservations and check in systems outage that left thousands of passengers stranded over the weekend.

At least 116 flights were reportedly cancelled as staff struggled to check in passengers manually from around 8am yesterday.

The airline announced that the issues were resolved this morning and that it was working through flow-on effects of the disruption.

Virgin Blue spokesman Colin Lippiatt said it was "too early to say" how much the outage cost the airline, which provided hotel accommodation for "hundreds of guests" stranded outside their home towns.

"It was an issue with an external supplier's hardware," he told iTnews today. "The external supplier in question was Navitaire."

Bringing systems back online was "a joint effort" between Virgin Blue's IT staff and Accenture subsidiary Navitaire, which also served Jetstar, Qantas, Regional Express and Skywest.

An Accenture spokesman would not disclose details of any service level agreements in Navitaire's contract with Virgin Blue.

"On 26th September there was hardware failure which impacted Virgin Blue's IT reservation and check-in system," she said.

"Navitaire and Virgin Blue worked together to bring the systems back online, which included detailed testing prior to turning them back on."

A Jetstar spokesman said Jetstar also experienced "two very brief outages" - 15 minutes yesterday morning, and 15 minutes in the afternoon.

"We did go to manual check-in for two very brief periods but didn't experience any delays as a result," she told iTnews.

When Virgin Blue adopted Navitaire's New Skies platform last year, its CEO Brett Godfrey said New Skies supported the airline's "long-term growth and our commitment to provide the best value for money".

Lippiatt said the airline would be "having some talks" with Navitaire about the outage, but its current focus was on transporting passengers to their destinations.

Updated at 2.37pm to include Accenture's comments.

Accenture subsidiary blamed for Virgin Blue outage

4 comments in this discussion

""Outsourcing" is not really the correct way to describe this. It's a company that provides products (New Skies) that Virgin and many other airlines use. Am I outsourcing because I'm using WinXP? ..."

By 66biscuits

Tags

accenture, navitaire, jetstar, virgin, blue, airlines, outsource

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Comments: 4

hsvandrew Sep 27, 2010 5:15 PM	I just hope that maybe, just maybe, companies will finally wake up to the IT outsourcing fad that has resulted in failure after failure by companies with under skilled technicians and a focus entirely on profit. There is no excuse for this type of outage in today's world. The idea of redundancy is that you can have an entire data centre blow up and simply fail over to your other data centre with different hardware in a completely different location. Considering how much money I suspect Virgin is paying for their services, I cannot understand why this type of problem can occur. It will cost them far more than the cost of the contract to pay all the compensation to customers and the loss of customer loyalty is almost unmeasurable.
wjc Sep 27, 2010 6:44 PM	Remember - "fail soft" and "hot standby"? These were the STANDARD approach of the mainframe era and the ability for the "hot" backup to "kick-in" within a few seconds was THE STANDARD. The problem has to be: a. use of commodity, cheap server hardware systems with unknown MTBF, MTTR and ML (mainframes have that well and truly set out), b. ICT outsourcing contracts (as here with Navitaire) that do not clearly specify such "hot"/warm backup requirements with clear and onerous penalty clauses. There is an enormous reliability and resilience difference between the manufacturing standards of a mainframe system and a commodity server/PC. Of all companies, Accenture (Navitaire's parent) must know that! Such transport systems as Navitaire's are easily classed as being part of the nation's critical information infrastructure. It is really up to government to clearly set out the regulatory environment in whcih such critical infrastructures must operate. The market has NEVER, EVER acted to create safe and secure systems. Outsourcing of the critical business systems for any company, such as this case with Virgin, has to be really questioned. After all, those computer systems are equally important as the planes!
DJ Sep 28, 2010 11:50 AM	You might be forgetting the fact that the outsourcing contracts are screwed to minimum cost with maximum SLA expectations. The unlikely event of a complete systems failure is probably worth the risk to corporates such as Virgin -vs- the cost of outsourced multiple DC failover and redundancy options. This type of redundancy costs an absolute fortune when you are dealing with infrastructure and systems of this size. Any lost loyalty to the Virgin brand will be quickly recovered and the show will go on. There's no point banging on about perfect world technical scenarios, because businesses who outsource are not looking for 100% uptime, they are looking to fix costs on basic service delivery.
66biscuits Sep 28, 2010 5:31 PM	"Outsourcing" is not really the correct way to describe this. It's a company that provides products (New Skies) that Virgin and many other airlines use. Am I outsourcing because I'm using WinXP? No, I'm just using a Microsoft product. Airlines don't create their own distribution systems, providers provide them. It's just another business relationship. Don't blame the fact that it was outsourcing. Something did go horribly wrong here and no doubt Virgin have plenty of cause to pursue compensation from Navitaire, probably written deep into the contract. The fault may be that Virgin paid for a service setup that wasn't up to the demand placed on it. The fault may be that Navitaire didn't deliver the paid for package. Virgin group of companies didn't pop up out of the sand this week, they are clever. Virgin Blue succeeded where countless other airlines couldn't compete with QANTAS. I have worked with them and I can bet this scenario (or even worse) was factored into the TCO of using new skies.