IHG consumer and franchise-related systems have been down for more than a day. The issues started at 9 PM ET on Sunday and continued at 1 AM ET on Tuesday (the time of writing this piece).
The website and apps are up, but IHG One Rewards account access doesn’t work, and you cannot pull up any hotels on the search or make bookings. All existing bookings are not accessible or modifiable at the moment.
You can access IHG here.
READ MORE: IHG One Rewards Rate & Bonus Points Offers
UPDATE: IHG Now Confirms A Hack:
IHG Confirms The Reason For Prolonged “Website Maintenance” – HACK
This also affects IHG-affiliated hotels. IHG’s internal systems used by properties for reservations and support are non-accessible. Also, the support lines for hotels are not answered or are busy.
Some IHG’s consumer-facing systems came briefly back online Monday between 11 AM and 1 PM ET and have been down ever since.
You can access IHG’s home page:
Hotel search returns nothing for New York:
The app returns a 504 error message that indicates that there is no response from the server:
Conclusion
The system outage has already cost IHG and its affiliated hotels millions in lost bookings.
Also, how is IHG going to deal with cancellations that guests were not able to process due to the system not being available? Surely, the hotels won’t go ahead and charge them?
Many companies conduct system and software updates on Sundays, a slow day. Something must have gone completely wrong, however, if IHG could not revert swiftly back to the previous working version when things started to go badly.
And what is up with IHG’s communication to both hotels and guests? Why pretend that everything is running smoothly when nothing is?
Wouldn’t it be the right thing to have a notice on the website and app that there are underlying data access issues that are being worked on and check back shortly?
I hope that this is just IHG’s IT incompetence and not a ransomware attack.
