Ferry booking system still down after fire

A ferry operator has said it expects reservation systems to be fully operational from Thursday after days of disruption.

Ferry bookings for sailings to and from Guernsey continued to be disrupted on Wednesday after a fire caused a reservations system outage.

Guernsey's main ferry operator Brittany Ferries said it had been affected following the incident at a data centre, a facility housing IT infrastructure.

Since the fire on Thursday, it has been unable to access its reservations system so customers could not make or amend bookings online or through its contact centre.

Brittany Ferries said: "We apologise to all Channel Islands customers affected by problems with the reservation system. We are working with our third-party supplier to return services to normal as quickly as possible."

It continued: "We have been informed this should be done today - and thank everyone for their patience in the meantime."

On Monday, Brittany Ferries said work to resolve the issue was continuing and it was hoped access would be restored "no later than close of play".

Brittany Ferries, which runs services between Guernsey, Poole, Portsmouth and St Malo, said it would keep customers updated while the incident was dealt with.

Anders Rundberg, from Carus, which supplies information systems to the travel and transport industry, said it managed the servers for the booking system.

He said the firm used IBM Cloud to host its services and a "huge fire" at their Amsterdam data centre on Thursday morning had resulted in the "power loss", causing "all equipment and servers" to go offline and disrupting cloud services.

This, he said, led to loss of access to the live system and backup data - affecting about 10% of Carus systems.

He said IBM was working to restore the power supply and they would get the system back in operation "as quickly as possible".

"After every major incident, there will be a follow-up resulting in recommendations that we will implement to avoid this from happening again," he added.

"We are well aware of the disruption and inconvenience this has been to both the operator and their clients and are really sorry for that."

Brittany Ferries' website continues to carry a message saying: "Customers travelling today will be unaffected, but we remind you to arrive at the port at least 90 minutes before departure and have your booking reference/confirmation ready to provide at check-in."

In a customer update Brittany Ferries Guernsey said for people who needed to travel urgently there was limited availability to accept bookings at the port for immediate one-way travel on sailings on Wednesday and Thursday, subject to availability.

These included the 19:45 Portsmouth to Guernsey crossing on Wednesday and the 08:15 Guernsey to Portsmouth, 10:00 Guernsey to Poole and 14:15 Poole to Guernsey crossing on Thursday.

It asked people to arrive at least 2 hours prior to departure to allow sufficient time.

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