Router failure blamed for Virgin check-in outage

Virgin Australia was forced to deal with a backlog of flights over the weekend after a router failure caused a two-hour check-in system outage on Friday night.

Virgin’s customised Sabre system went down from around 7:30pm to 9:15pm on Friday, resulting in the cancellation of over a dozen of its domestic flights leaving from eight cities around the country.

The two-hour outage was caused by the failure of the Optus router that provides network service to the Sabre booking and check-in system, a Virgin spokesperson said. The system itself experienced no issues.

“We are working with Optus to conduct a full investigation to ensure that this does not happen again,” the spokesperson said.

The outage meant delays and a backlog of flights on Saturday. Virgin was forced to cancel some flights to accommodate affected customers and reposition delayed aircraft over the weekend.