US Airways Cites Data Center in Systems Outage

US Airways says a nationwide disruption of its computer systems Friday afternoon was caused by a power outage affecting one of the company's data center facilities. The systems outage knocked the usairways.com web site offline and also affected reservations systems, leaving passengers unable to make reservations, check in online, change their flights or check flight status.

The problems caused significant delays and outages at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, one of the airline's primary hubs, which rippled through to flights at other airports. The issues began Friday afternoon, and the reservations system was offline until later that evening.

"Early reports indicate that the systems outage was the result of a power outage near one of our data centers in Phoenix," US Airways said in a statement. IP records show US Airways' web site is hosted by AT&T, which operates a data center in the Phoenix market.

Data centers are designed to supply backup power to keep computer systems operating in the event of a utility outage. It's not immediately clear why the utility outage caused downtime in the U.S. Airways data center.