Major Apollo Outage Causes Delays Across the System; Operation Still Recovering

United's operation is slowly getting back to normal this morning, after running for more than four hours yesterday without Apollo, the company's customer reservation system.

The Apollo outage occurred just before 5pm Central time on Tuesday and lasted till almost 9pm.  More than 200 flights and 20,000 customers were delayed while the system was down.  Flight delays lasted an average of 55 minutes.

"The outage made the situation at our airports very difficult for our customers and employees yesterday afternoon, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused," says Pete McDonald, executive vice president and chief operating officer.  "I was over at O'Hare during the outage.  Lines were long, and our customers were frustrated.  Our employees did a very good job in a difficult and stressful situation, writing boarding passes and bag tags by hand and trying to get customers on their way as soon as possible.

"In addition to the airport people, employees from all across the company managed the outage as effectively as possible, ensuring that we had no cancellations and that we were ready to go this morning."

According to Eric Davis, managing director and chief technical officer, the outage occurred when a system at United's vendor, Cendant, failed.

"A team of employees from ISD, Cendant and IBM worked to restore the system, but several initial attempts failed," Davis says.  "We are confident that the system is stable in the short term and are still working with our vendors to identify the root cause of the problem, so we can ensure this does not happen again."