Thousands of passengers of Canadian low-cost airline, Sunwing Airlines Inc, face a fourth day of flight delays after a third-party system the airline uses was hacked, according to the CEO.
It has been widely reported this week that passengers remain stranded abroad and vacations have been delayed for others because of the technical issues that began on Sunday afternoon.
During an interview with CP24, Sunwing Airlines CEO, Mark Williams, revealed that the system the airline uses for check-ins and boarding was “breached.”
“Obviously, this is a terrible situation and one that we didn’t expect,” added Williams. “We certainly apologize to everyone for the inconvenience this has caused."
On Tuesday, the airline tweeted that they were manually checking people in for all flights.
#SunwingUpdates: While our systems provider continues to work on resolving the system outage, we continue to manually process as many flights as possible but expect further delays. Please note that all impacted passengers with flight delays over three hours will be compensated.
— Sunwing Vacations (@SunwingVacay) April 19, 2022
“A system that is up and running all the time, which never fails, was hacked,” Williams told CP24. “They had a cyber-breach, and they’ve been unable to get the system up.”
Sunwing Airlines added that they expect further delays, and it is unclear when Sunwing Airlines will be operating normally again.
Williams told CP24 that due to the sensitive information that might have been breached, government agencies want to ensure that the breach has been remediated before resuming operations.