Qantas outage pinpointed on leap second Linux bug

Amadeus has confirmed an outage to its hosted Altea airline system on Sunday was triggered by a Linux kernel bug prone to the global leap second pause.

The diagnosis confirmed the suspicions of Twitter users during the outage that the extra second — added to keep the world's official atomic clocks in sync — was behind the systems crash, which caused chaos for airlines including Qantas.

"This incident was caused by the Linux bug triggered by the 'leap second' inserted into clocks worldwide on June 30," an Amadeus spokesman said in a statement.

"We are now investigating how we can enhance our ability to detect and address such bugs in advance.

"We take any systems disruption very seriously."

The spokesperson apologised to its airline customers and to travellers that were impacted by the systems outage.

iTnews reported Sunday that there was chaos at Qantas check-in desks across the country, leading to flight delays.