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Hundreds of Southwest Flights Delayed By Online Booking Problems
An anonymous reader writes: A technology problem delayed hundreds of Southwest Airlines flights Sunday while the airline checked-in passengers manually at airports. Around 300 flights had been delayed as of Sunday afternoon. In a statement on its website, Southwest said intermittent technical issues "are impacting website performance in creating new bookings and requiring us to process some customers manually as they arrive for travel."
Odds on it's due to systemd.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
News for nerds on the same day that it matters? Nice.
I hope therer isn't too much flail resulting from this. Flying in the US is already painful enough.
... to a hole in a donut it's a breach.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This isn't the first time Southwest has had problems with their system capacity. A few months ago they had a fare sale and the resulting traffic locked up both their website and their call center. How hard is it to build autoscaling for their reservation system? Apparently really, really hard.
After flying a lot for years I hadn't flown for a couple years until a few weeks ago. I've never seen it take as long to get through the gate as it did on this trip and 100% of the delay was from people trying to get the scanners to read their phones/pads. It was pretty funny.
I was at a big box store yesterday when the computer went down. They called all the cashiers to the service desk and passed out kits of multipart forms so that they could manually write orders. However, they had to look up prices on the website using their personal phones, since most items just had bar codes, and none of the cashiers had ever had to compute tax on a calculator before. It was hilarious.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
To their credit, SW handled it very well on the flights I took today. Baggage was fine and the boarding process was ordered to revert to paper boarding passes. People with e-passes were simply required to show ID. Flights were delayed maybe half an hour. Not bad for a nationwide infrastructure outage.
Having been caught in this mess, mainly due to a delayed flight, what was a simple, one layover 6 hour flight, turned into a three layover 12 hour odyssey, where I'm fairly certain that I only got my luggage to me due to sheer luck.
I've never had this much trouble flying...
-merlyn
They should send choppers with spies and shit to get Scorpion from his low-key digs so he can fix that control tower. It worked in Season 1.
lucm, indeed.
Maybe they use AWS EC2 and all the capacity got sucked in by Netflix, who just released Supernatural Season 10...
lucm, indeed.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Southwest sold its soul to Bangalore and is now enjoying the benefits.
Tens of thousands killed in the US-supported civil wars (supported by massive weapons supplies [blablabla]
You want stories about a major airline's IT infrastructure shitting itself? Slashdot is the right place.
You want stories about the latest twitter feud between Katy Perry and the Kardashians? Go on TMZ or people.com
You want to discuss your alleged "US-supported civil wars", Bush's crime against humanity or the plot to discredit Hillary Clinton? Go see Mother Jones or some other left wing website.
To each his own, and if you don't respect that there's other websites for you out there, lookup the website of the Westboro Baptist Church or the various youtube channels supporting ISIS, those people also think they know what matters and what doesn't.
lucm, indeed.
They are doing the needful.
These reservation systems are actually technological marvels and a bit of a miracle that they work at all. They often not only track purchases, but they also have to dynamically self-correct for delays. If a plane full of people in Houston are delayed 3 hours then it has to begin a system wide dependency calculation to find them all seats on later flights. I can see just at a glance how that would be a nightmare to distribute and scale easily. You can't have a race condition where two delayed flights try to put all of their passengers who will miss connections onto the same flight. And then you get into the calculation "do you delay another flight so that delayed connecting passengers can make their connection but then cause passengers on the that flight to miss their next connection... which is worse?" etc.
So how much of that is actually done automagically and how much is actually done by a person in a box, with the system simply sorting out the details?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I love when the technology goes does, you see how little people actually know or care about there job. I'd be very surprised if any of the airport employees were working at even 20% of an acceptable speed. The technology is only an aid, not a replacement, you have to be ready to jump when it fails and kick into full blown action.
I work at at airline in the operations team (not SouthWest). Here it's all done by people.
Being an airline, they just do everything in the least logical way possible and the passengers have no choice but to suck it up and do what they're told. No need to optimize anything here.
My check in involves filling out a couple web forms at home or while driving the the airport.
Check in is infinitely faster than it used to be, most airports have faster security too (not all though).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I second this - things are much faster, for me at least. Manchester NH is my "30 minute airport". I live a couple of towns over and I can:
1) Get up off my couch
2) Grab my bags
3) Get in the car and drive to the airport
4) Park long term
5) Check in at the counter (I check my bag, not carry it on)
6) Go through security
7) Get through the airport so I am standing in front of my plane's gate.
All in 30 minutes or less. Who could ask for more?