JetBlue Airways has confirmed a power outage, which affected its online booking system and airport check in, was not caused by ‘a cyber security issue.’
The airline blamed an outage at a Verizon data center for grounding flights and causing chaos at airports for several hours.
JetBlue said the disruption took down the online check-in and booking systems, along with gate systems and flight tracking.
Power was restored to the data center about two hours later but the knock-on effect of earlier cancelations and delays resulted in long lines at many airports.
Several hours after power was restored by Verizon, JetBlue said systems were still ‘slowly coming back up.’
Some passengers were checked in manually while images were posted on social media of long lines at airports in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Due to the disruption, JetBlue said it would waive change and cancelation fees for affected flights and offered free rebooking for alternative flights for travel through January 19.
