Amtrak website screen shot THE TICKETING system for Amtrak,down!

THE TICKETING system for Amtrak, America's government-backed passenger rail company, was down for most of Sunday. Despite the company's predictions that its system would be back at full capacity by early Sunday afternoon, Amtrak was still having problems on Monday. If you go to the railroad's website now, you can probably still see the warning and error messages that customers across America faced over the weekend.

But this was no surprise outage. It wasn't caused by a natural disaster or computer problems. No, it was a planned upgrade of Amtrak's ticketing system that fried online ticket booking, shut down Amtrak's "Quik-Trak" ticket kiosks, and left passengers who wanted to book trips waiting in long lines at ticket desks or sitting on hold with the railway's 1-800 number. Amtrak's ability to process credit card payments was limited, too. In short, if you wanted to book a ticket on Amtrak yesterday, you were in for a lot of inconvenience. And on Monday, despite Amtrak's promises, travellers were facing some of the same problems. (I was in a station today and some of the Quik-Trak machines seemed to be back up. But online booking was still down as of this writing.)

Obviously every company has to upgrade its computer systems from time to time. But while Amtrak claims that it posted warnings about the outage on its website, the publicity surrounding the upgrade was woefully inadequate. I visit the website frequently, and I didn't notice the warning (which should have been a huge banner across the top of every page on the site), but CNN says it asked passengers to "please arrange to purchase and pick up ... tickets before Sunday." Of course, if you needed to make a last-minute reservation or had a flexible schedule, you might not even have looked at the Amtrak website before Sunday. By then, it was too late.

Amtrak could have warned many of its passengers about the outage by telling the press about the upgrade. Unfortunately, I couldn't determine whether the company issued a press release because its press release archive was apparently a casualty of the upgrade. The outage received very little coverage in the US media, so I'd be surprised if Amtrak made much of an effort to alert the media. Amtrak also should have plastered its stations with notices about the upcoming outage. That didn't happen. The Quik-Trak machines that many of Amtrak's passengers use to buy and print tickets should have had prominent on-screen warnings about the outage. No luck there, either, as far as I can tell.

Finally, it's worth noting that almost all of Amtrak's passengers—especially last-minute travellers who like to book online—have already given Amtrak their email addresses. Why not just email them on Friday and let them know the system is going to be down? Perhaps Amtrak didn't get its passengers' permission to use their emails, but that's not the passengers' fault. In any case, this sort of PR debacle is unacceptable from any company, public or private. Amtrak should apologise for the chaos and the lack of sufficient notice, and take steps to make sure this doesn't happen again.