An outage at the airline reservation system Sabre caused headaches for airlines around the world early Tuesday morning . The outage lasted about two and a half hours . `` Sabre is experiencing a system issue , '' the company said in a tweet shortly after it began . `` Our technology team is working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation . '' ' Virgin Australia manually checked in customers . Johannesburg 's international airport said British Airways flights experienced delays . ANd Alaska Airlines said 50 flights failed to take off on time . It was n't clear Tuesday morning how widespread the problem was while it lasted . The Sabre system is used by more than 300 airlines and more than 100 airports worldwide . `` More than 300 million passengers are put on airplanes every year using our technology , '' the company says .
Virgin Australia says it is manually checking in customers . Comment: The system is used by more than 300 airlines .