Orbitz site on the fritz

Orbitz suffered a site outage on Thursday for the second time in eight days. The travel site was out of commission until about 12:30 p.m. PDT. Orbitz, which competes with online travel agencies Travelocity and Expedia, also crashed last week for an entire day, the most severe outage the two-year-old company had ever experienced.

Human error during scheduled site maintenance was the cause of Thursday's glitch, an Orbitz representative said. It was unclear whether the problem was linked to the cause of last week's outage, which was a faulty Oracle database. Orbitz is owned by the five largest U.S. carriers, American Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines.