Omni Hotel IT Outage Disrupts Reservations, Digital Key Systems

Guests affected by the companywide disruption vented their frustrations on social media.

UPDATE
This story was updated at 3:30 ET on April 4 to reflect new information about the cause of the outage.
Omni Hotels & Resorts last week experienced a cyberattack that led to an outage, bringing down the companys IT systems.
In a
notice on the Omni Hotel website
, the company explained that after learning of the
cyberattack
, it shut down its systems to protect its data.
This cyberattack
impacted operations
and hotel functions such as reservations, hotel room door locks, and point-of-sale (POS) systems, but it is unclear what data, if any, was impacted.
The Omnis website went down Friday as well but was back in service by the weekend, with a notification to customers reading, Dear valued guest, we are currently experiencing technical difficulties, please try back at a later time.
Customers shared their experiences on social media sites like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit.
On a r/hotels Reddit thread, a
user posted about the hotel outage
, alerting that the computer systems were down. Another user responded saying Its pretty bad. They have it so you have to text them to come let you into your room, and it usually takes 30+ minutes for an employee to get there and unlock it for you, referencing the inoperable digital locks on hotel rooms.
Omni hasnt disclosed what caused this cyberattack, ransomware or otherwise, though Elise Carmichael, CTO of Lakeside Software, said that identifying the causes of these kinds of outage can be like finding a needle in a haystack for some companies.
Organizations will go into a war room either literally or virtually — pulling a dozen people at all hours to find this needle. Unfortunately, today, finding this needle is exceedingly difficult as nearly every organization is reactionary, Carmichael said in an emailed statement to Dark Reading.
Carmichael recommended that organizations and businesses collect the kind of data they need to solve these kinds of issues prior to an event like an outage or cyber incident actually happening.
With this kind of visibility, they can
predict problems
before they disrupt the business at wide scale, preventing most of these war room situations, Carmichael added.
Omni has launched an ongoing investigation into the attack and is working to restore whatever systems are not yet fully operational. The hotels will remain open and are accepting new guests and reservations on its website.

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Omni Hotel IT Outage Disrupts Reservations, Digital Key Systems