The president of Sunwing airlines apologized Tuesday to passengers who have been stranded for days and said the network outage affecting its flights is the result of a cyberattack on a third-party provider.
“Obviously, this is a terrible situation and one that we didn’t expect,” Sunning CEO Mark Williams told CP24 in an interview. “Certainly apologize to everyone for the inconvenience this has caused.
“Our goal is to get people on vacation on time with a new airplane and with great service. And unfortunately, because of a third party provider having a system outage we have not been able to perform the way we would like to.”
He went on to say the third-party provider had “been breached,” leaving the airline working “around the clock” to write boarding passes for passengers by hand.
“A system that is up and running all the time, which never fails, was hacked. They had a cyber-breach and they’ve been unable to get the system up.”
Because of the breach, Williams said, aviation authorities in both Canada and the United States want to make sure that the third-party system is secure before it is reactivated.
He said Sunwing is the only Canadian airline which uses the provider.
He pointed out “there’s a lot of sensitive information in an airline system” and said “there’s a lot of interest from Transport Canada, the FAA and others to understand what happened and also to not bring the system back up online until they’re assured that it’s safe to do so.”
He said he is reluctant to give an estimate for when things will be up and running because so far, updates from the vendor have not been reliable.
Williams did not say whether any passenger information had been accessed in the breach.
PASSENGERS STRANDED FOR DAYS
Travellers trying to get on Sunwing flights continued to face hours-long delays today as the outage affecting the airline’s check-in system continued.
On Sunday and Monday hundreds of passengers were stranded at Pearson International Airport for a good chunk of the day, as Sunwing delayed virtually all of its flights due to the network issue.
In a statement provided to CP24 earlier Tuesday, the airline said that its “check-in systems provider continues to experience a system outage,” which is in turn affecting its flight operations for a third consecutive day.
Around 21 flights were able to get in the air by Tuesday evening.
But the statement that “additional flight delays can be expected.”
As of late Tuesday afternoon a total of seven flights that were supposed to depart Pearson International Airport had been rescheduled for tomorrow.
While some flights were able to depart on Tuesday, most of those only took to the skies after being delayed by more than 24 hours.
“Our third-party systems provider, Airline Choice, continues to work with the relevant authorities to find a resolution to the system issue as soon as possible,” the statement from the airline notes. “In the meantime, while we continue to process flights manually, additional flight delays can be expected and customers are advised to sign up for flight alerts on Sunwing.ca.”
The cyber breach affecting the check-in system for Sunwing has impacted flights at all of the airports that the airline services, with some reports of travellers being stranded in the Caribbean for days.
Some customers have expressed frustration with the communication they have received from the airline.
One traveller, who spoke with CP24 on Tuesday, has been trying to return to Toronto from Cancun for the last three days but has had his flight repeatedly delayed.
He said that he has now booked a return trip to Canada for tonight but had to do so “at significant cost,” as no Sunwing flights were available.
“We have been given the runaround. We don’t know who to talk to. They keep telling us to talk to Toronto, we talk to Toronto and Toronto tells us to talk to the people here. So it’s just been a complete mess,” the traveller, whose name is Ben, said. “We don’t speak the language, we came here based on Sunwing’s trusted source of going to a resort and coming back.”
PRESIDENT SAYS PASSENGERS WILL BE COMPENSATED
Williams told CP24 Tuesday night that there will be “some fairly significant cash compensation that everyone will be getting” because of the delays, but that each individual case would vary by the hours of delay.
The airline is providing travellers whose flights have been cancelled with hotel vouchers but only if their home is more than an hour drive away from the airport. Other travellers who live in the GTA are being given limo vouchers.
Williams said the airline will also allow passengers to delay their vacations up to June 23 of this year if they are able to do so.
However one industry watcher told CP24 that the carrots handed out by the airline are unlikely to be the end of the saga.
“This is going to go on for months and months where there are going to be receipts and claims given to Sunwing, given to insurance companies, it is really just a big mess and the worst part is it is not over with,” Martin Firestone, who is the president of Travel Secure Inc. told CP24 on Tuesday afternoon.
“They still don’t have a conclusion to the technical problem, I suspect it will go on until tomorrow or even the day after and at that point who is going to go on a seven day trip when they have already missed three days of it? There is a good chance they will walk away period from the whole trip.”
Williams said Sunwing may look at changing vendors to avoid similar problems in the future and said he hopes passengers will try the airline again at a later date to “see what the real Sunwing product is.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
