It is not a fun time to be Qantas.
The airline once Australia’s favourite has had quite a tumultuous return to “post-COVID” “normal”, with no shortage of news about lost baggage every day. But this weekend, another issue plagued the airline: an IT outage.
Qantas flights across Australia have been affected by delays believed to be caused by a nationwide outage. While details of the outage are not yet known, the issue, Qantas said, began Sunday afternoon. The delay initially continued for about 90 minutes.
According to 9News, cabin crews told waiting passengers they couldn’t take off until the computer system was up and running again. Flights on the tarmac were also reportedly halted as crews struggled to process paperwork manually.
While this Qantas IT outage was reported yesterday, Monday morning was still a mess at major Australian airports – initially, a dozen planes were experiencing delays, but it had a domino effect across the network. At the time of publish, over 40 flights out of both Sydney and Melbourne had been cancelled, across Qantas, Virgin Australia, Jetstar, Rex and Emirates.
Qantas’ Twitter is very quiet, ridiculously quiet in fact. While most companies turn to the blue bird site to share updates and reply to customers’ character-limited grievances, Qantas has opted for silence. There’s no shortage of the airline being “@-ed”, though. The last tweet from @qantas was July 25, informing us of flight delays out of Sydney due to heavy fog. The last few replies were in response to different people about different baggage losses.
Gizmodo Australia has reached out to Qantas, but full disclosure, the company is asking media to submit enquiries through a contact us page, so we’re not holding our breath, but we’ll update you when we learn more.