Qantas website suffers bookings glitch

Australian airline Qantas has lost at least five hours of online bookings overnight and several hours this morning after an unacknowledged outage.

The qantas.com web site remained online but attempts to book flights or log in to frequent flyer accounts resulted in server errors from around 6pm until 11pm last night and for several hours this morning.

“The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request,” the site said.

Customers - well known IT identities among them - took to Qantas’ Facebook and Twitter accounts to vent their frustrations. Many noted they had attempted to book by first checking in as Frequent Flyers.

Anyone else struggling with the Qantas website tonight? Tried 4 browsers on 3 platforms on 2 networks + 3G and can't get flights

— Stephen Spencer (@sspencer_63) June 11, 2013

How long will the #qantas site be down for?? Wow in this day and age.. what excuse do you have to be offline! #epicfail

— Clive Gold (@clivegold) June 11, 2013

None of the airline’s @QFcustomercare or @QantasAirways Twitter accounts or its Facebook page acknowledged the outage.

@qantasairways your website is not working but not a single proactive update on twitter to let your customers know whats going on. Not good!

— Glenn Stafford (@Glenn56) June 11, 2013

A Qantas media representative told iTnews the airline was "aware of intermittent website booking issues" and said engineers would work to resolve the problem.

"Customers experiencing website booking difficulties can call 131313 to make bookings during this time," the representative said.

Qantas uses the Amadeus online bookings engine, but bookings for other global Amadeus customers appeared to be transacting as normal during the outage. Qantas uses Oracle's Siebel system to manage its Frequent Flyer program.