[ari_elle]

"American said the issue was caused by an inability to get access to its reservations system, called Sabre. The electronic system, often described as the brains of an airline, is responsible for bookings and reservations but also manages a wide variety of functions related to flights, including printing boarding passes, online check-ins, ticketing, and tracking checked bags. [...]

Sabre, meanwhile, said American’s system outage did not come from its own computer systems. Other airlines, including Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, use the reservation system and have not experienced any outages, said Nancy St. Pierre, a spokeswoman for Sabre."

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/american-airlines...

[ryanmarsh]

SABRE was fine. Some of the systems at AA couldn't talk to it. Having seen their systems none of this surprises me.

[jchrisa]

Somebody probably let an API key expire...

[cyanoacry]

A similarly described SABRE outage in 1989 seems to have caused minimum trouble, because they had the real capability to work off-line with paper:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/13/us/computer-chaos-for-air-...

> Apparently, no information about reservations and other travel plans was lost, and American said there were no serious disruptions of its 2,300 daily flights.

[pjbrunet]

From the NYT article, sounds like it was a connection problem. Which makes you wonder, was it a DoS attack (either end of the connection?) preventing AA from connecting to Sabre?

[mikeash]

Not really related to this outage, but I think it's interesting to note that Sabre dates back sixty years! The ball got rolling in 1953, with a chance meeting between AA's president and an IBM salesman. IBM was working on a massive air defense computer system at the time, and they decided that a similar system would be good for airline reservations. The system went live in 1960, and has been running continuously ever since.

[chrisrogers]

Indeed, this is one of the more interesting systems evolutions of our time. Its inspiration was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a cold war-era air threat assessment computer with real distributed qualities and light gun interfaces! By way of IBM, SAGE begat the Semi-automated Business Research Environment (SABRE, as it was then). It was the first GDS, and has operated in one form or another for 60+ years. Very impressive stuff, and humbling from the perspective of a mere software engineer. Working with such systems, with services interacting sometimes directly with green screens, is a far cry from Facebook and Twitter APIs, or ITA for that matter. This stuff is solid and vital, and the fear (not to mention cost) to manipulate it is astounding.