Orbitz: Oracle to blame for site outage

The online travel company promptly dumped the 9i RAC database software

By Linda Rosencrance

July 17, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Orbitz LLC, the airline-owned travel Web site, suffered an outage yesterday related to an Oracle database on which Orbitz operates the site, according to a spokeswoman for the Chicago-based company.
Orbitz spokeswoman Carol Jouzaitis said it was the most severe outage to hit the online operation since the site launched approximately two years ago.
Declining to go into detail about what happened, Jouzaitis said the site went down early yesterday morning and was back up very early today. She stressed that no customer data was lost or corrupted as a result of the outage.
"It was an [Oracle] database issue, and we decided to make an architectural change to the site, a change that will put us in a position to move forward with even higher reliability," Jouzaitis said. "The site is performing great now."
Jouzaitis said that as a result, Orbitz is no longer using Oracle Corp.'s 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) database software.
An Oracle spokeswoman in a statement this afternoon stressed that no customer data was compromised by the outage.
"As with all Oracle customers, we worked closely together with our partners and Orbitz to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," she said. "No Orbitz customer data has been lost or corrupted as a result of the situation yesterday, and the site is again operational."
The Orbitz outage comes at a time when Oracle is touting its "unbreakable" software in an extensive marketing campaign. "Unbreakable" refers to a database that will not go down, even if the server or the site fails. Oracle is also in the midst of a hostile takeover of rival PeopleSoft and is trying to project a customer-friendly image.

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