“This was a situation beyond our control and we apologise to affected guests for the inconvenience and seek their kind understanding,”
Spokesman for Scoot, wholly owned by Singapore Airlines
The spokesman also said the carrier had been working overnight with their vendor to resolve the outage.
A hardware failure at a datacenter provided by Scoot’s check-in system vendor, Navitiare, caused flights to be delayed by 8 hours. This resulted in many unhappy passengers who saw their weekend travel holiday itinerary ruined and headed to Scoot’s Facebook Page, FlyScoot, to address their unhappiness.
On the contrary, hardware, like the human body, do highlight symptoms before going into total failure. However, such symptoms cannot be analyse by the naked eye. Symptons of hardware failure include high memory usage, decreasing or increasing speed of the fan, long ping response time, etc. IT monitoring solution like those provided by NetGain Systems will alert the respective IT teams, by sms or email, when these devices cross critical threshold levels, determined automatically or manually by the IT department.
As such, IT teams can address the imminent IT device failure before it reaches the end-user.
In Scoot’s case, it seems that the failure reached the end-users first and the IT team scrambled to identify the cause and provide the necessary solution. The 8 hours delay could also be an indication that the IT team was spending more time trying to find the cause of the problem instead of addressing it.
IT is now a prevalent part of any business and any IT downtime, as seen in the Scoot example, is an extremely expensive experience for the company.
Just one glance at Scoot’s Facebook Page, FlyScoot, now and you can see the complaints filed by affected passengers on how the delay ruined holiday plans and even questioning Scoot’s ability to react to such situation.
Dear Scoot Community,Our booking system provider is currently facing some hardware issues at their data centre, hence…
Posted by FlyScoot on Friday, 10 October 2014
Wrote Arifin Dingaroo Othman
Time is now 0345hrs on Monday, October 13th. Looks like the Scoot management team is not bothered to come back on a weekend to resolve it. At least get it up on the social media to explain. I am doubting your service recovery plans. There is no one from the ‘suit’ team to come down and explain to all the paying passengers who had queued from 0945hrs on Saturday, October 11th. Again, for all the other flights no one from the ‘suit’ team would sacrifice their sleep and weekend to calm their paying passengers, i repeat, PAYING PASSENGERS.
Wrote Kathy Tham From Hong Kong,
Flight from Singapore to HK hasn’t left yet? We have been stuck in HK for the past 3hrs. No resolution was provided by the staff. Totally unacceptable.
Wrote Jeremy Mok
System outage and no contingency and don’t even have the decency to put delayed on the airport departure board waiting for more then 2 hrs and still not at the counter to check in. Really really bad experience.
The downtime damaged Scoot’s reputation as they work towards profitability in the challenging long haul budget space.
Why risk expensive IT downtime when you can nip it in the bud early when symptoms can alerted via email or sms before failure reaches the end user? Contact NetGain Systems today.
