UPDATE
This story was updated at 3:30 a.m. ET on April 4 to reflect new information about the cause of the outage.
Omni Hotels & Resorts suffered a cyber attack last week that led to an outage, crashing the company’s IT systems.
In a notice on the Omni Hotel websitethe company explained that after learning of the cyber attackit shut down its systems to protect its data.
This cyber attack 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 affected.
Omni’s website also went down on Friday, but was back up and running over the weekend, with a notification to customers that read: “Dear guest, we are currently experiencing technical difficulties, please try again later.”
Customers have shared their experiences on social media sites like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit.
In a Reddit “r/hotels” thread, a the user posted about the hotel’s outage, warning that the computer systems were down. Another user responded by saying, “It’s pretty bad. They have it, so you have to text them to let you into your room, and it usually takes over 30 minutes for an employee to get there and unlock it for you,” referring to unusable digital. locks in hotel rooms.
Omni did not disclose what caused this cyberattack, ransomware or otherwise, although Lakeside Software CTO Elise Carmichael said identifying the causes of this type of outage can be “like finding a needle in a haystack” for some companies .
“Organizations will literally or virtually enter a war room, dragging a dozen people at all hours to find this needle. Unfortunately, today, finding this needle is extremely difficult because almost all organizations are reactionary,” Carmichael said in a statement emailed to Dark Reading.
Carmichael advises organizations and businesses to collect the type of data they need to solve these types of problems before an event such as an outage or cyber incident actually occurs.
“With this kind of visibility, they can do it predict problems before they shut down large-scale activity, preventing most of these war situations,” Carmichael added.
Omni has launched an ongoing investigation into the attack and is working to restore any systems that are not yet fully operational. Hotels will remain open and are accepting new guests and reservations on their website.