Skift Take
Expedia Group websites from the U.S. mainland to Puerto Rico, India and Dubai were experiencing outages.
Many Expedia Group websites in the U.S. and other locations around the world were down Sunday afternoon Eastern Daylight Time for at least several hours.
In a statement to Skift late Sunday afternoon, Expedia Group tied the outages to site maintenance it conducted.
“We experienced technical issues on some of our sites over the weekend due to maintenance,” an Expedia Group spokesperson said. “Our teams quickly addressed the situation to bring our services back online.”
The company declined to provide further detail about the statement or to respond to additional questions.
Searches conducted early afternoon from New York, Puerto Rico and Dubai, for example, found Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Orbitz, Wotif, and eBookers — all Expedia Group brands—with notices on their desktop websites that the sites were unavailable.
Expedia.ca was down in Canada. Expedia and Wotif were not functioning in searches conducted from Portugal.
The outages were sporadic.
Vrbo, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Wotif and eBookers were down in India, but Expedia and Travelocity were up and running.
The outages began to be reported on social media at least as early as 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
The Expedia.com homepage message advised users to try use the app, “which may be available when the site is not.”
Here are some of the messages we saw on Expedia Group websites:
Expedia.com
The Expedia.com homepage stated: “Sorry! Our site is currently unavailable. We are working hard to fix the as soon as possible. In the meantime, try using our app; it may be available when the site is not.”
Vrbo
The Vrbo homepage stated: “Something went wrong on our end. We’re working to get things up and running soon. Check back shortly!”
Hotels.com
As of late afternoon Sunday, several of Expedia’s X accounts had not given any indication of anything wrong to its customers.
Unanswered Questions
There are several unanswered questions about the outages. Why did maintenance take down so many websites?
Expedia Group last year completed a multiyear project to transition both Hotels.com and Vrbo onto the Expedia.com tech stack. There was no mention in the statement whether out outage was related to that platform migration.
Did the layoffs of so many of the employees who worked on the tech stack migration have a role in the outages?
Why did the outages affect so many of Expedia Group’s websites but not others such as Hotwire?
Were the outages global?
SEO consultant Michael Cottam tweeted about the outages early Sunday afternoon: “Wow, a bad day for OTAs! Both Expedia AND http://Hotels.com websites are totally down, and with different errors. At least http://Hotels.com has a “down for maintenance” message.”
Wow, a bad day for OTAs! Both Expedia AND https://t.co/8KHhbWDktx websites are totally down, and with different errors. At least https://t.co/8KHhbWDktx has a “down for maintenance” message.
— Michael Cottam (@Michael512) May 5, 2024
Note: This story was updated to reflect an Expedia statement on the outages.