United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage

From reader Peter McDermott comes word of a computer outage with effects to dwarf those of the one that stranded thousands of US Airways passengers last week. This time, it's United Airlines' systems that are out of commission and unable to handle passenger reservations, leaving passengers stranded all over the U.S. According to Peter, experiencing the resultant delays first-hand at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., United planes are being sent on — along with their passengers' luggage — to the cities from which they're to leave tomorrow morning, in anticipation of the computer system being fixed in the interim.

Re:Fairly common

[The Wild Norseman]

This regularly happens [google.com] to Virgin in Australia.

Passengers getting fucked by Virgin?

Is this some sort of "in Soviet Russia" joke?

Re:US Airways last week, now United?

[Mindcontrolled]

Hm... if you want to get paranoid, perhaps Homeland Security requested some additional access rights on the airlines' computer systems and managed to foul up whatever they touched in the process?

Re:Damn Skynet.

[Black Parrot]

Instead of getting an AI that just wants to outright kill us all, we got one that just wants to fuck with us...

We were expecting Doomsday, and got Dumbsday?