Changi airport restores check-in services after global outage hits several major airlines

SINGAPORE — A global software outage involving the check-in systems of several major airlines, including Singapore Airlines (SIA), caused travel disruptions around the world for at least three hours on Thursday (Sept 28).

Changi Airport was among the major airports hit by the outage, with SIA and Qantas among the airlines affected.

The exact number of airlines and aviation hubs around the world that were hit by the outage remained unclear.

Media reports and social media posts suggested that flights in the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, the Reagan Airport in Washington DC, as well as others in Johannesburg, Melbourne and Zurich were affected as well.

The software problem was first discovered around 5.30pm by several airlines, prompting some to resort to issuing manual boarding passes for frustrated passengers.

Mr Luis Concistre, a traveller at Changi, tweeted a photo of long lines at the departure hall at about 6.34pm. He wrote: "Check-in system down at SIN #chaos."

SIA replied to Mr Concistre on Twitter, saying: "Hi Luis, please bear with us while our IT team is looking into the issue. Thank you."

Changi Airport announced on social media at 8.37pm that the check-in systems of affected airlines had been restored. Qantas said its flight operations were not affected by the outage.

According to The Telegraph, the travel chaos is reportedly caused by problems with the Altea check-in software, which many airlines use. It is unclear, however, if there's been a software glitch, or a malicious attack by hackers on the system by Amadeus, a Spanish IT firm.

An Amadeus spokesman said: "Amadeus confirms that (earlier), we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems.

"Amadeus technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and restore services as quickly as possible. That action is ongoing with services gradually being restored."