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Feds to probe airline IT outages
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) will be tasked with investigating a series of IT outages which had caused widespread travel chaos at the nation’s airports over the past year.
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida has called for an official probe last month, Reuters reports.
There have been several high profile glitches caused by various IT issues, including one in August 2016 which grounded about 2,000 Delta flights over several days.
"The issue of airline IT system crashes is serious and appears to be getting worse," Nelson wrote in a letter to the GAO.
He asked the office to look at the impact of these outages on airline passengers and explore any regulatory options to prevent further tech failures.
Nelson requested details on the number of flights delayed or canceled, how many passengers were affected, how long it took airlines to recover and the actual cause of each outage.
United Airlines also suffered two major outages and Southwest Airlines also had to cancel thousands of flights after its system was hit by a glitch last year.
Yet another outage yesterday – this time traced back to GDS Amadeus – caused some disruption at airports globally.
Amadeus said it suffered a faulty switch problem but identified and fixed it relatively quickly.
It impacted passenger check-in at airports around the world.
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Editor for TravelMole North America and Asia pacific regions. Ray is a highly experienced (15+ years) skilled journalist and editor predominantly in travel, hospitality and lifestyle working with a huge number of major market-leading brands. He has also cover in-depth news, interviews and features in general business, finance, tech and geopolitical issues for a select few major news outlets and publishers.
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