QFF profile online - all of my bookings have disappeared

[RooFlyer]

I guess the wider questions are:

* How actively does QF IT monitor their web site for anomalies or 'glitches', and then

* Why can't they quickly put up either a default page (the total site log on issue last week was not remediated with a 'basic functionality' page until the next day!), or advice on the front /landing page that there is a particular issue etc etc.

Its all very well for us here to be able to discuss it, and maybe even get a comment from Red Roo, but for the average punter, it would mean a call to the call centre, put on hold as the call centre is flooded with calls, leading to even worse experience all round.

I would think that the web site is 'business critical' (well, maybe not as critical as aircraft maintenance ) and would deserve higher priority to fix / get advice out than we have seen recently.

 

[simongr]

I think the hard part would be the approval to initiate some form of business interruption event. A couple of calls saying "the website is down" might be user problems rather than a QF problem. If you then take the main page off line you are taking a business critical system offline. It might only be the FF page that is offline and ticket booking might be ok and how easy might it be to take parts of the website offline but not everything.

On some levels the website might be more critical than maintenance. An inability to get maintenance finished on time might delay a flight - the website being down might give people the opportunity to sample a competitor and not come back...

 

[ozmille]

I can still see my bookings OK

 

[Red Roo]

I'm happy to confirm that access to all booking, timetable and Frequent Flyer functionalities has been restored.

I note your comments regarding the lack of a general, public announcement. I agree that this forum is very useful to those who use it, however there are many variables involved. In some cases, the issue may be resolved soon after any update is available or an alternative is arranged.

Please be assured that any issue with our website is always given maximum priority due to the significant impact of downtime.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

 

[Pushka]

I have no idea if this is related but Microsoft pushes out updates late Wednesday night and frequently on Thursday morning it has crashed our server.

 

[RooFlyer]

I think the hard part would be the approval to initiate some form of business interruption event. A couple of calls saying "the website is down" might be user problems rather than a QF problem. If you then take the main page off line you are taking a business critical system offline. It might only be the FF page that is offline and ticket booking might be ok and how easy might it be to take parts of the website offline but not everything.

On some levels the website might be more critical than maintenance. An inability to get maintenance finished on time might delay a flight - the website being down might give people the opportunity to sample a competitor and not come back...

Agreed there must be care in diagnosing a problem, but that's what I meant about self monitoring. I'm not IT guy (that much would be obvious), but you'd think that a constantly running 'routine', constantly sampling the operability of the site, or at least say the 10 most critical or often used functions, via a number of dummy accounts would be in order?

And they should never have to take the system completely off-line. Again, acknowledging my lack of IT nous, I would hope that enterprises where the web site is critical would have a duplicate site running in parallel, so if the primary became corrupted, say in a scheduled system upgrade or tinkering, or maybe a hostile act, then the duplicate is brought live. Yes, a significant cost - but again, how valuable to cash flow and business reputation is a smoothly functioning web site?

I'm pretty sure the investment bank I used to work for had 2 remote IT sites, one of which could take over at short notice, the other after a bit of pumping up.

 

[Pushka]

Bank websites are always taken down completely for routine maintenance and they are pretty critical.

 

[RooFlyer]

Bank websites are always taken down completely for routine maintenance and they are pretty critical.

Yeah, but usually in the middle of the night (Although it is annoying when you are overseas and its happening in the middle of the day!)

 

[Pushka]

Yeah, but usually in the middle of the night (Although it is annoying when you are overseas and its happening in the middle of the day!)

Or you can't sleep and try to check something and of course that's the time.