Amadeus Altea, the computer check-in system used by 125 airlines worldwide, has crashed, delaying thousands of passengers

Passengers are currently facing delays at check-in and boarding as Altéa, the computer system used by 125 airlines worldwide has crashed. Altéa is used for check-in, updating reservations and for swiftly boarding passengers.

Amadeus, the Spanish company providing the software for Altea, has said in a statement that they are working on the issue: “We face a network issue that is causing disruption.”

The system is used by 10 of the 15 oneworld airlines and 18 of the 28 Star Alliance airlines, and also by the Air France-KLM Group within the Skyteam alliance. Currently, British Airways passengers are unable to access bookings and to check in online. Problems have been reported at London Gatwick, Zurich and Paris CDG.

Brussels Airlines passengers were asked to check in online, other passengers were checked in manually.

Update: the problem has been solved. Many airlines incurred delays, but few, if any, cancellations.

The software was not the result of slippery fingers by Amadeus engineers but was in fact due to the dreaded Leap Second bug. It is necessary from time to time to insert a single second into the daily clock to ensure the rotation of the earth on its axis keeps in line with solar time. But given that so many of the world’s systems and processes are controlled electronically, including airline hosting, adding a second into the digital clock is perhaps not as easy as it sounds. This is what happened to Amadeus: some systems running on Linux were hit by a bug triggered by the insertion of the additional second on the clock at the stroke of midnight GMT on Sunday.

Forum discussion: http://www.aviation24.be/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=62252.

A list of all Altéa users: