Passenger Trains > Amtrak Reservations down

"Sorry for the inconvenience. Currently there is a system issue preventing your request from being processed.
[Error ID: 503S]"

Inventory changes being loaded...when this is being done the system goes down. (explanation from Amtrak contact)

GenePoon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Sorry for the inconvenience. Currently there is a
> system issue preventing your request from being
> processed.
> "
>
> Inventory changes being loaded...when this is
> being done the system goes down. (explanation from
> Amtrak contact)

Don't see any issue here. Seems to be working fine now.

many weekends

Just how long did you wait before deciding that this was Trainorders newsworthy?

ColdRainAndSnow Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Just how long did you wait before deciding that
> this was Trainorders newsworthy?
=====================================

Waited until an Amtrak contact replied as to the cause.

By the way, how often does American Airlines Reservations go down for an extended time
on Saturdays in the daytime?  United?  Delta?  Southwest?  Alaska? 

what are their numbers in comparison, and the others make money, don't have congress threatening them
n/e corridor is probably the quietest on the weekend?   airlines have snafus too with their systems



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/16 19:04 by dan.

I can only speak for American, but trying to access a reservation and getting the message, "Our system is having trouble. Please come back later." is not that uncommon on AA.com. I had it happen for several hours a week ago when I was trying to do on-line check-in. There is a topic devoted to AA.com problems at Flyertalk. It is started fresh each year, and the 2016 edition is up to 113 replies. Stuff happens.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/16 19:11 by prr60.

dan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> what are their numbers in comparison, and the
> others make money, don't have congress threatening
> them
> n/e corridor is probably the quietest on the
> weekend?   airlines have snafus too with their
> systems

I know that United's reservation system experiencing "glitches" have made the news a few times the past several years. GenePoon has posted his bias in favor of American Airlines in the past, and so far, their reservation systems haven't made much news, so I won't diss his post.

Maybe Amtrak and United got sold a "bill of goods." Both organizations seem to have management problems, at least IMHO. :-)

GenePoon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ColdRainAndSnow Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Just how long did you wait before deciding that
> > this was Trainorders newsworthy?
> =====================================
>
> Waited until an Amtrak contact replied as to the
> cause.
>
> By the way, how often does American Airlines
> Reservations go down for an extended time
> on Saturdays in the daytime?  United?  Delta? 
> Southwest?  Alaska? 

In less than 30 seconds, I can pull numerous examples of airline system outages from the Web. Just a sample...

http://www.tnooz.com/article/sabre-outage-hits-airline-reservation-systems-globally/ 
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/16/american-airlines-reservations-system-down-flights-grounded-nationwide.html 
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/companies/united-flights-grounded-computer/ 
https://twitter.com/flyfrontier/status/245553030383144960 
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/southwest-airlines-technology-glitch-causing-nationwide-delays-n442521
http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/2015/09/american-airlines-ground-stop-lifted-after-technical-woes-brought-dfw-flights-to-a-halt.html/

Technical issues are a part of life. Get over it. Another Much Ado About Nothing post...

Interestingly if you go on an airline themed forum after one of those outages, there is much outrage towards the airline that had the outage.   On TO when Amtrak has an outage, there are excuses and complacency....

Low standards.

GenePoon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Low standards.

Poor understanding of how things work in the technology space. 

System restarts happen all the time in the financial industry. US Saturday night is a preferred time, since most world markets are closed.

I don't know if Amtrak uses tandem processing, I do know that most financial companies use it. In that example, two or more computers are constantly running, and receiving all transactions, updating files, etc. But only one is feeding results to the customer.  if that machine goes down, the other machine instantly takes over, and the process is supposed to be flawless and transparent to the customer.

in some cases, like broadway shows, airlines, etc. you have dynamic inventory. When I click on a seat, that seat is held for two minutes, or some defined period of time. If I don't complete the transaction, the trade is cancelled and the seat goes back into the inventory. Amtrak's system works the same way.

Though organizations work hard to mitigate system downtime, incidents happen and that is just part of running enterprise platforms. A company operating at three nines or 99.9% uptime availability is allotted up to 43m/year of downtime as part of that metric. Operating at 99% uptime availability still implies over 7 hours of annual downtime.

Companies would of course prefer to operate at five or six nines. But to point at an outage as if it is proof of Amtrak IT negligence without offering any proof of such either 1) shows you don't understand the nature of enterprise software or 2) are too blinded by your grinding ax to know better.

If you have proof that this problem was caused by Amtrak IT negligence, then put up or pipe down.


 

I used to do releases of new code on a website of a large company that dealt with real-time billing and account reporting.  Our releases were always very early on Sunday mornings, when traffic on our sites were the least.  Yes, we did have occasional outages at other times, but usually we were pretty good.  I did hate those bi-weekly releases, as it essentially ruined my weekends, and then the Monday morning fallouts of any release issues.