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Hundreds of Southwest Flights Delayed By Online Booking Problems

Posted by samzenpus on from the just-a-bit-longer dept.

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."

6 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Frosty by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Odds on it's due to systemd.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. An article the same day? by snorris01 · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:An article the same day? by wvmarle · · Score: 2

      Wonder why every little issue with aviation is newsworthy.

      A couple thousand people delayed/inconvenienced due to computer glitch - headline news! Big problems! Get out the disaster mitigation plans!

      Millions of people lost personal information to identity thieves: minor issue.

      Tens of thousands killed in the US-supported civil wars (supported by massive weapons supplies - which recently I read are being increased significantly in the wake of Russia's involvement) in the Middle East: no problem, as that's not Americans/Europeans dying, and they're fighting "some evil regime".

      Even hurricanes that swamp and knock out parts of Manhattan (without anyone wondering how come the US is so ill prepared against a bigger-than-average rainfall) for weeks, and it's barely as much reported on as a little aviation-related issue.

    2. Re:An article the same day? by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

      Wonder why every little issue with aviation is newsworthy.

      Because aviation is a utility. The same things come through when power is out to lots, or such. And bonus to the "nerd" part is that it involves online bookings.

      Even hurricanes that swamp and knock out parts of Manhattan for weeks, and it's barely as much reported on as a little aviation-related issue.

      No, it's covered here, in great detail. People talk about the power junctions under the road not being water tight, the pumps for the tunnels not working, the power lines buried vs above ground, Global Warming's role in the storm. I see lots of articles when big storms bother many people.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
  3. What the fuck is wrong with Southwest's IT dept? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  4. Southwest did a pretty good job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.