Websites of major airline companies American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines , Delta Air Lines and Virgin Australia faced an outage early on Thursday, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.
More than a thousand user reports indicated problems at Southwest Airlines, with over 400 user reports indicating the same for Delta Air Lines, according to Downdetector. That number was around 300 for the other two airline companies.
Southwest canceled nearly 300 flights on Wednesday and delayed more than 500 a day after it was forced to temporarily halt operations over a computer glitch.
Virgin Australia said in a statement,
"We are currently experiencing a system outage which is impacting our website and Guest Contact Centre. We apologize for any inconvenience."
United Airlines told one twitter user,
"We are experiencing technical issues and working promptly to fix them. We will update you once this matter is resolved."
Not only Airlines, banks and government institutions have also been hit by the internet outage. Many of the affected websites in Australia, such as those belonging to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, had started to come back online late afternoon on Thursday.
It was not immediately clear if the outages in Australia and the United States were linked.
Companies including Hong Kong’s exchange and Southwest said they were investigating the incident.
