Customers of the US low-cost airline JetBlue suffered tavel delays for several hours, after a power outage took down a data center operated by Verizon this week. The incident suggests that the airline may not have failover provisions.

All JetBlue data center based cervices failed on January 14^th after a maintenance issue caused a power failure at the airline’s Verizon owned and operated data center. Problems were reported by stranded travelers starting at approximately 11:30 AM and Jetblue reported that all services from the facility were restored by 8 PM, with major services coming back up throughout the day, starting by 2:30 PM ET.

Bumpy landing

Verizon reported that the data center power outage occurred at 11:37 AM and JetBlue was able to get its online reservation service and airport check-in operational by 2:30; approximately 40 minutes after they reported that power had been restored in their online blog. Their complete suite of online services, including features such as flight tracking, was not restored until almost 8 PM, however.

JetBlue attributed the failure completely to its data center partner Verizon and directed questions as to the actual cause of the failure to Verizon. However no information has been forthcoming from Verizon beyond the JetBlue report that a maintenance issue caused the failure.

As with any flight service interruption, problems that delay flights cause a cascade of problems with travellerss reporting long lines at JetBlue hubs, some flights cancelled, and many flights delayed. Various news reports indicate that JetBlue did a good job of keeping customers informed as to the status of the problems, but it would appear that the firm has been keeping all of its data center eggs in one basket, as the failure occurring at the single Verizon site brought down the customer support infrastructure, which included airport check-in and gate operations, until that location was restored and the application running at the site were brought back online.

The fact that JetBlue  apparently uses a single site with no failover for its operations may highlight one area where discount airlines are cutting corners to keep their prices low. Maintaining a failover site for the customer support services could have prevented the traveler delays and flight cancellations. However, the risk of revenue loss would have to be balanced with the cost of maintaining that second site. The apparent reliability of their single site operation so far could have made failover operations seem like a poor investment for the company.