Aer Lingus cancels all flights on two US routes to Miami and Minneapolis-St Paul

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• ChrisBCN says:

  1 Jun1 June 04:39

  That’s some IT issue! Wonder why they couldn’t roll back whatever caused the issue.

  • sayling says:

    1 Jun1 June 08:38

    Indeed – contingency and backup planning seem a little remiss

• MT says:

  1 Jun1 June 05:26

  I assume if they were having some sort of hack / crpto issue we would have heard about it by now in the press by now, but it does seem like this length of time its almost like they are locked out the systems also!
  I guess it could be their IT support is significantly affected or the how FC side of things is to dependant on to few a people!

  • Chrisasaurus says:

    1 Jun1 June 07:50

    Hack would be notifiable under dpa, crypto possibly too but a good old fashioned catastrophic failure not so much.

    Although: Is there and provision under dpa/gdpr for there to be circumstances to delay notification of data subjects eg active investigation?

    • Paul says:

      1 Jun1 June 08:19

      EasyJet took months to notify so my money is on a hack – time to change all those passwords yet again me thinks!

      • Chrisasaurus says:

        1 Jun1 June 08:35

        Assuming you FC password wasn’t reused elsewhere then changing passwords offers no extra protection.

        But a hack could have been already relayed to the ICO ‘without undue delay’ without it being publicly known yet and the lack of any acknowledgement on VS’s part is pretty incriminating in my eyes.

    • Charlieface says:

      1 Jun1 June 14:25

      Yeah, just realised our S3 login details are saved by our server, so anyone with access to the server can delete backups also. We need to make separate users on S3 so the server can only write, not delete.

      • Lady London says:

        1 Jun1 June 14:41

        Um….traditionally “delete” was a type of “write” function. You might have some embedded overlap for that.

      • Charlieface says:

        1 Jun1 June 16:49

        Sorry I think the term is “create”
        Back to the topic, they quite clearly have had a serious meltdown, most likely a whole server with few if any backups or failovers. I do IT and if it had happened on my watch I would have been sacked within the month

      • Lady London says:

        1 Jun1 June 19:46

        I’m going back to early coding days when operating systems required someone to have ‘write’ access (as compared to ‘read’) in order to be able to delete a file.

      • Lady London says:

        1 Jun1 June 19:50

        and yes you prob do mean ‘create’
        Yes I agree you would have to use some fast footwork if you hadn’t useable recovery files for this. More than a week down forva customer-accessible system is a bit embarrassing 🙂

      • memesweeper says:

        1 Jun1 June 22:10

        “Vault lock policy” is your friend. Like a WORM drive of old.

• Sharon says:

  1 Jun1 June 07:46

  I have a reward flight booking with aerlingus to Miami in December. I’ve messaged them 3 times and they say there’s been no changes to the schedule. Confused.

  • Jake says:

    1 Jun1 June 13:24

    I am in the same boat but my reward flight is in August.

    On twitter they advised me:

    Flights to/from Miami in August are operating as planned. Unfortunately, our timetable is changing so frequently at the moment that we’re unable to confirm new bookings to be made on some routes via the website.

    I don’t believe this and it annoys me I will have to pay a £35pp admin fee to cancel/rebook if they insist on pretending they haven’t cancelled it. Sadly I need the avios refunded to re book something otherwise I would just hang on till 24 hours before for them to have to cancel it….

    • Lady London says:

      1 Jun1 June 14:44

      Sounds a bit cheap of BA.
      Could they be hoping the US will reopen by then so you would have to take the flight?
      Could they be right?

• C F Frost says:

  1 Jun1 June 08:20

  My wife spent £100 on her supp Amex in Waitrose on the morning of last week’s Amex supplementary giveaway screwup.

  £100 of statement credit has just landed.

  • Stu N says:

    1 Jun1 June 13:51

    I got my £!00 credit from spend at Apple on my supplementary card as well.

• Henry Young says:

  1 Jun1 June 08:24

  Virgin Club IT has been problematic for months. I had a failed Miles Booster back in September 2019. After a lot of back and forth I had to end up requesting a refund which they seemed happy and swift in fulfilling. Then in Dec 2019 I tried a minimum points transfer from AMEX to Virgin, based on reports that the initial “set up” transfer can take a while but subsequent transfers are immediate. It was never processed, while transfers to other schemes went through to the various expected schedules. So with 8 months of IT issues, don’t hold your breath … It’s a shame because redemption on VS207 one way out of HKG still offers fantastic value, although HKG is not yet open for non-interlined transfers and the off peak window just closed until 7 September.

• Bob says:

  1 Jun1 June 08:34

  They have definitely been hacked…

  • Rob says:

    1 Jun1 June 09:59

    Not a lot of value in hacking Virgin Flying Club accounts is there?! What are you going to do, book a flight for September on stolen miles?!

    • Alex M says:

      1 Jun1 June 10:51

      You don’t understand how stolen data could be used, Rob…

    • memesweeper says:

      1 Jun1 June 11:11

      I might pop round and burgle your house when I know you’re away. Or impersonate you and steal real money, not points, from your bank or other institutions. If they’ve lost the contents of the FC database they are duty bound to tell those affected.

    • James says:

      1 Jun1 June 11:32

      Can’t points immediately be redeemed for Virgin Wine and other tangible goods?

      Also Rob, don’t forget, someone could get a list of logins (from Pastebin and other sites) and sit on them for 6-12 months, hoping Person X won’t reset their password

      • Rob says:

        1 Jun1 June 12:59

        No, there are no online redemptions you can redeem immediately. All require a call which has security checks.

    • Craig says:

      1 Jun1 June 14:06

      The value is what happens if Virgin go bust or keep cancelling flights. Having email addresses and flight details make scam emails promising compensation very easy.

  • Charlieface says:

    1 Jun1 June 14:24

    Hanlon’s razor:
    “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
    They probably had their single server go down with no good backups. Happens more often than people think.

    • Lady London says:

      1 Jun1 June 14:49

      Yes especially if key parts of their discdropped out they could have saved corrupted backups going back quite some time as well.

      But based on what a pain logging in to their database has been anytime since I’ve been a member.,and the number of other times their website has not been working properly, I think Rob’s comment about Virgin having always had rubbish IT is probably what’s going on.

      Pretty unacceptable though.

• James says:

  1 Jun1 June 09:59

  I’m still 100% convinced it’s a breach. Reset Password also fails which is usually one of the first signs of rogue access as it would prevent further accounts being compromised from the email addresses they already (Clear text) vs the passwords (should be hashed). It wouldn’t be too hard to guess from a list where people have reused passwords.

  Tip: Use the iCloud Keychain / strong passwords (Apple folk)
  Use 1Password (everyone else)

  • memesweeper says:

    1 Jun1 June 11:37

    Bitwarden is an excellent password manager for Apple and non-Apple folks.

• ian_h says:

  1 Jun1 June 12:37

  Radisson Rewards Question – does anyone have any experience of receiving points from a partner / same household etc (no status) and whether this counts as activity to reset the expiry clock?

  Thanks

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