New update. Used WhatsApp chat. At first they claimed it was a schedule change (it was not) and wanted to rebook the entire married segments JNB-CDG-AMS-YYZ resulting in a different CDG—AMS segment due to married segments. I pushed back that I wanted my original flights restored as all were still individually available. I told the agent that married segment logic should not matter in this case, I was not making a voluntary change. I also told them that I had heard this was a bug impacting numerous passengers. The agent was surprised I knew what married segments even were. She said she would forward to support. 2 hours later she came back and said it was indeed some kind of bug in the system that the support desk has been dealing with but didn’t know what caused it. They had restored the downgraded segment thus making the pnr match the existing eticket coupons. She asked if I was okay with the changes so that she could reissue the ticket. I stated I didn’t see why she even needed to reissue since now the pnr and coupons matched. She said all changes need to be reissued. It didn’t sseem like she was very knowledgeable about ticketing. She reissued which resulted in a new ticket number with all segments and class codes matching the previous eticket.

Hopefully it sticks. This whole mess is very concerning. In 25 years of flying I’ve never heard of a situation like this where ticketing automation screwed up so many pnrs.