Next week, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, United Airlines will be taking most of its systems offline for a controlled restart and cutover window for their SHARES reservation system. Here’s what they’re telling their own travelers internally,
On February 4, 2026, from approximately 01:55-04:00 (Central time) United will be going through a major system update that will involve an outage of our Shares GDS. During this time, it will not be possible to see flight schedules, book travel, retrieve existing bookings, perform ticketing transactions, perform cancellation and/or refund transactions, or check in for flights using myIDTravel or ID90 Travel, as well as United’s own employeeRES or United app tools.
United has already pre-canceled most flights that depart during this time period. We strongly encourage staff travelers to plan in advance for this outage if they will need to travel on United, and book early. Additionally, we recommend checking in before the outage begins (check-in is open up to 24 hours before departure using the United app), especially if travel will commence shortly after the outage ends.
Some other communications show the window as 1:30 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. rather than just 1:55 a.m. to 4. It’s framed as a “technology upgrade which will restart our systems” to maintain “better functionality and reliability.”
With the reservations system down, United.com and mobile app, call centers, kiosks, travel agency channels and partner airline access are down during the window. Departures are paused during the window, but already-airborne flights continue. There’s no:
- Schedule display
- New bookings
- Reservatoin retrieval or servicing
- Ticketing
- Cancellations/refunds
- Check-in
In terms of the different anticipated timeframes, that’s likely a function of the hard downtime for the host system (“no transactions accepted”) versus a longer period for re-opening different channels in stages.
United hasn’t said exactly what they’re doing, and their IT architecture isn’t something I’m expert in. One possiibility is moving host systems and you’d want a clean transaction stop during the cutover. If they’re upgrading database layers, messaging systems or batch schedulers or tightly coupled systems around SHARES they might schedule a restart window.
The goal they’re promoting is better functionality and reliability after the controlled restart. But United has said more about its SHARES passenger service system transformation work more broadly.
- gradually moving systems and logic into cloud
- seat maps are a starting point – legacy systems were fragmented:
“Seating at United was complex, with 30+ applications managing seat assignments.. [and seat maps/assignments are] embedded in every part of the PSS.
- moving away from old flat files, with “90% of code/business logic in assembler” and rules scattered across multiple applications and interfaces
They’re trying to move away from mainframe and green screens into cloud architecture. After the outage, though, we may have more clues abotu what United has done.
- It was mostly infrastructure/reliability. No feature or interface changes to united.com, and potentially fewer errors online or dealing with agents.
- A step towards offer-order merchandising changes in how flights and prices are shown to customers
- MileagePlus In United’s earnings call they signaled major changes to the frequent flyer program in coming weeks, so this could be preparing for how that’s handled.
A planned restart/cutover that takes SHARES reservations capabilities offline for a few hours may just be ‘operational resilience’ whether from a new system environment or better redundancy setup. But it also may be more, and we’ll start to know mid-next week. If any readers are familiar with the details, I’d love to learn more.
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