Virgin America Stalled by Web Attack, Finally Starts Selling Tickets
The new airline promises a low-cost, high-tech in-flight experience that's already wowing the geek brigade. But first-day website problems have some scratching their heads.
CIO — After a prolonged and highly political fight to get off the ground, airline startup Virgin America finally began selling tickets last week.
But just as the low-cost carrier launched on July 19, its website was hit with what CIO Bill Maguire says was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "We had lots of activity and people hammering the site, which is exciting," says Maguire. "But on some things there was a real slow response." He says his team identified a specific pattern associated with SYN flood attacks. "It slowed us down for a little bit there," Maguire says. "We quickly isolated it, corrected the slip and kept cranking right along." During the slowdown, Virgin America's call center, which it outsources to a provider of home-based agents called Arise, took up the slack, Maguire adds.
Maguire describes the incident as a "blip" in an otherwise successful launch and wouldn't do anything differently. "What it does prove is no matter how much you prepare-whether it's functionality you're developing for a website or anticipating something destructive, you do the best you can to anticipate every incident you might encounter-things happen," says Maguire. "It's Murphy's law."
Not everyone agrees. "It just doesn't sound good for a new airline that has fought for more than a year and a half to get the authority to fly," says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Forrester Research who, like some others, wondered if the site indeed was hacked or if the airline just wasn't prepared for the heavy customer load. "The fact that in 2007 an airline can start up-one with good management, good funding, experienced people who understand the important role e-commerce plays-and somehow the website could crash, whether it was hacked or not, shows that not all the i's were dotted and not all the t's were crossed." Despite Virgin America's claim that the website lethargy lasted only an hour, Harteveldt insists it was longer, and that the outsourced call center wasn't equipped to scale up to meet increased demand.
Unfortunately for the nascent company, its approval to sell tickets from the Department of Transportation came on the condition that it get rid of CEO Fred Reid, whose status as an airline veteran helped get Virgin off the ground with investors. The DoT determined that Reid was too close to foreign investors (read: Richard Branson) and stated that the CEO must be replaced by November. U.S. law has prohibited foreign investors from owning 50 percent or more of an airline or more than 25 percent of its voting rights, and legacy carriers had launched a concerted lobbying effort to prove to the DoT that Virgin America somehow violated that law. (For more on the fight, see Virgin America Launch Delayed. "Virgin America has been a pawn in a political struggle that goes way beyond their ability to fly," says Harteveldt. "Reid is a qualified executive. But Virgin America offered him up as a sacrificial lamb and the DoT called their bluff."
