Story highlights

Virgin Australia says it is manually checking in customers

British Airways flights in Johannesburg experience delays

The system is used by more than 300 airlines

CNN  — 

An outage at the airline reservation system Sabre caused headaches for airlines around the world early Tuesday morning.

The outage lasted about two and a half hours.

“Sabre is experiencing a system issue,” the company said in a tweet shortly after it began. “Our technology team is working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.”’

Virgin Australia manually checked in customers. Johannesburg’s international airport said British Airways flights experienced delays. ANd Alaska Airlines said 50 flights failed to take off on time.

It wasn’t clear Tuesday morning how widespread the problem was while it lasted.

The Sabre system is used by more than 300 airlines and more than 100 airports worldwide.

“More than 300 million passengers are put on airplanes every year using our technology,” the company says.