Gee, this took a while to rear its head here. Anyway, as I work (loosely nowadays) in the IT area, I have been interested to hear the back story here.
It was interesting to hear this morning that
VB are blaming their booking system 'provider', Navitaire (a spin off from Accenture which, IIRC, used to have a close associate with Microsoft). I wouldn't think they'd do that lightly, without being sure that they were factually correct.
Anyway, redundancy (be it Data Centre, comms links, systems etc) comes at a cost. 99.999% (
What is 99.999? - Definition from Whatis.com) uptime comes at a cost too. So, yup, someone screwed up - but it still may be
VB, if they decided that "she'll be right" and went for a lower spec'd system.
Time will tell and I, for one, will be watching with interest. I bet Navitaire will be checking with their lawyers too.