ARROW is Down; (Arrow has returned)

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yarrow

yarrow

Engineer
Joined
Feb 25, 2006
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far ne washington state, 1/2 mile from canada
i have been able to acess the main page of amtrak's website today but anything beyond that i get a message that the site is down. i would imagine "julie" is working but still this can't be good for our national passenger rail system to have its site down for a while. anyone know more?
 
yarrow said:
i find also that "julie" is down and amtrak agents have no idea of train status. i wonder how and if they are taking reservations
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The Hawaii radio news a little wile ago said Amtrak's entire computer system was down and the were unable to print tickets leaving travelers stranded while trains were on time? What is the truth?
 
It's been kinda funky all day. I just tried to look up the status of #92 into Columbia and after a while, it said that the site was temporary unavailable. When I was buying tickets 2 weeks ago at around midnight, I seemed to have the same problem, except that the pages eventually loaded after about 5 minutes (or more). I ended up buying my tickets that morning before I left my house, and everything went smoothly.
 
yarrow said:
i find also that "julie" is down and amtrak agents have no idea of train status. i wonder how and if they are taking reservations
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The entire computer reservation system is down. Reports are that reserved but unticketed passengers are being permitted to travel without tickets. Sounds like a major mess.

One fear is that existing reservations were lost in failure. Amtrak says that is not true (and I certainly hope that even Amtrak would see the value of backing up data), but wouldn't that be a disaster of epic proportions.
 
PRR 60 said:
One fear is that existing reservations were lost in failure. Amtrak says that is not true (and I certainly hope that even Amtrak would see the value of backing up data), but wouldn't that be a disaster of epic proportions.
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that would be an epic disaster. they must have that data backed up somehow. i hope

(edited to fix quote - AmtrakWPK)
 
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I was wondering why it was down...

Hour and a half ago, I was trying to get the street address for TRI. Needed to see if the distance between it and the Hospital were within staggering distance. :p

P.S. Website still a no go at 0700hrs (Central Time).

April
 
This is starting to look pretty serious. Of course one can only speculate at this point as to what happened, but the longer things stay like this, the more likely it is that Amtrak either had a major hardware failure for which they don't have parts/manpower to fix yet (weekend), or there was a major data loss for which they had no backup, or both. Again, it's speculation on my part, but it's speculation based on a number of years of experience in the IT consulting field.

-Rafi
 
Ah, so that's why I've been unable to check on a reservation at amtrak.com for the last two days.

So, if you did want to travel today, and hadn't already picked up your ticket (especially if you already paid for it), what is one to do?
 
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rmadisonwi said:
Ah, so that's why I've been unable to check on a reservation at amtrak.com for the last two days.
So, if you did want to travel today, and hadn't already picked up your ticket (especially if you already paid for it), what is one to do?
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My understanding is that stations are mainly following set policies for when ARROW goes down. Those procedures are generally to hand-write tickets for on-location cash sales, and if people bring in printouts of reservations or email confirmations, to send them on the train with those, and to figure everything out later when the system is back up.

NARP is telling me that there is a daily backup every 24 hours, so worst case scenario, as far as we know right now, if there was data loss, the data restore would be current as of Friday night/Saturday morning.

-Rafi
 
Wow, I can't recall ever seeing a mess like this before! I just hope there was no danger of a hacking of sorts. I just made reservations Thursday, and booked a very short hop on Friday to correct a mistake I made on a previous booking for which I already have the tix.

The troubling part is that lately we've been "trained" in a sense to wait until the day of travel and pick up our tickets then, both to save us the 10% refund fee, and to save Amtrak added logistics in the event of a cancellation or change.

In light of this, I think I might pick up my Friday tickets to Philly as soon as things get restored instead of waiting to the morning of.

By and large, I would *guess* that Saturday is the lightest day on the NEC, though I would imagine it is one of the heavier days in other areas (Chicago corridor trains, Heartland Flyer, etc.) so the impacts are not as bad as they could be, but I sure hope Amtrak clears this up within a couple hours, as the Sunday evening "rush" could really be a bad one.

Even after this is mopped up, there's still the fun of reconciling peoples' AGR accounts for those who rode merely on printed reservations.
 
A company spokeswoman says replacement equipment was used to fix a nationwide computer system failure. Now, agents are working through the backlog, and some delays are to be expected.
Yesterday and earlier today, Amtrak ticket windows and kiosks weren't working, so rail travelers were forced to buy tickets on-board with cash.
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The breaking news from NBC News 21.
 
AlanB said:
A company spokeswoman says replacement equipment was used to fix a nationwide computer system failure. Now, agents are working through the backlog, and some delays are to be expected.
Yesterday and earlier today, Amtrak ticket windows and kiosks weren't working, so rail travelers were forced to buy tickets on-board with cash.
Click to expand...
The breaking news from NBC News 21.
Click to expand...
I've also gotten an unconfirmed report from NARP that one of Amtrak's mainframe facilities in northern Virginia (Manassas is the current name going around) was hit by lightning yesterday and had massive hardware failures affecting more than just reservations (as was evidenced by much of the Amtrak.com website being very flaky for simple things like station lookups). I'll be posting updates here for my paper:

Window on Washington

-Rafi
 
As a followup, I interviewed both Amtrak and NARP today and posted a blog item that I believe brings a number of new facts out regarding the outage. Here's the text, or click here for the Window on Washington report. Interesting tid-bit I didn't include in the story:67 was reportedly held in New Haven for the replacement hardware to be loaded in the baggage car and delivered to Washington.

Amtrak spokeswoman Karina Romero was nice enough to give Cox Newspapers a post-mortem followup to this past weekend’s complete shutdown of Amtrak’s reservations and ticketing systems:

-Amtrak expects to identify lost revenue as a result of the system shutdown, but will be looking for a spike in sales toward the beginning of this week from people who are calling back in to book reservations they intended to book over the weekend. That said, Romero suggested that the amount of revenue lost may not have been as substantial compared to what might have happened if the shutdown occurred during peak booking hours. “We’re typically not as busy on a Saturday or a Sunday as compared to a Monday,” said Romero.

-”For ARROW to go down for the entire nation was unprecedented,” said Romero. In cases where ARROW goes down at individual stations, the practice in the past has been for station ticket agents to call other stations to assist in looking up reservations. Because every terminal in the country was down, it appears that some station agents became confused as to what the standard operating procedure should be.

Click here for the full report, including the actual cause (wasn't software, after all) and the memo that was sent to all Amtrak employees today.

-Rafi
 
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It must be working OK. I picked up tickets from the machine while in CUS today. How easy is that to use. Wow!
 
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