According to Qantas, the outage crippled the airline's passenger reservation system throughout terminal 3 -- privately owned by the airline -- for three hours during one of the airline's busiest periods, just after 5 pm yesterday.
A spokesperson for Qantas said the outage caused "some" flight delays as Qantas check-in staff were forced to switch to manual means of processing passengers.
Qantas passengers affected by the outage told ZDNet Australia that check-in staff were unable to keep up with demands. Travellers, eager to get an early start to the long weekend, became impatient as ground-staff resorted to preparing boarding passes by hand.
A spokesperson for Qantas today told ZDNet Australia at around midday that the company was still looking into the cause of the system failure.
"They're trying to get up to speed at the moment and they're still having a look at all those types of things," she said.
Qantas began a project switch from the Qube reservation system to a new system, Amadeus, in November 2002. At the time, Qantas said becoming an "Amadeus Sales System User" was the first stage of its Triton program, which would involve the adoption of a new departure control, inventory and load control systems between 2003 and 2005.
Sydney Airport Corporation (SAC) today said it believed that the outage was isolated to Qantas reservation systems and not linked to any equipment provided by the airport administrator.
According to SAC, the airport's international reservations operations had occasionally been impacted by outages affecting all carriers, but that these were linked to failures in global baggage handling systems, and insulated from domestic operations.
