Omni Hotel IT Outage Disrupts Reservations, Digital Key Systems

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 company's 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 Omni's 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 "It's 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 hasn't 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.