Hundreds of Southwest Flights Delayed By Online Booking Problems 36
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."
Frosty (Score:4, Funny)
Odds on it's due to systemd.
Re: (Score:1)
He decides who flies today!
An article the same day? (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.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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.
You're barfing on the wrong tree (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
The story is not much about the IT infrastructure, as it is about the number of inconvenienced people and flight delays. Barely a word on the technical side of what went wrong and how it's being solved (which would for most of this tech and IT minded crowd be quite interesting), and what's said about that part is mostly marketing speak. How does this make the story slashdot-worthy? Just because it involved computers?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
The story is not much about the IT infrastructure, as it is about the number of inconvenienced people and flight delays. Barely a word on the technical side of what went wrong and how it's being solved (which would for most of this tech and IT minded crowd be quite interesting), and what's said about that part is mostly marketing speak. How does this make the story slashdot-worthy? Just because it involved computers?
Well, you've got a point there. I went to read the article but there wasn't a bit of technical information. I was hoping for some details, maybe an opportunity to bitch about Indian subcontractors like with that whole RBS fiasco a while back, but nothing. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Hunnert dollers ... (Score:2)
... to a hole in a donut it's a breach.
What the fuck is wrong with Southwest's IT dept? (Score:3, Funny)
I blame Castiel (Score:2)
Maybe they use AWS EC2 and all the capacity got sucked in by Netflix, who just released Supernatural Season 10...
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Did this problem make it better than the usual? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been using my mobile for months to check in, and fly 4-6 times a month. Not true.
You didn't even bother to speak to whether it took any longer to scan your mobile than to scan a paper boarding pass, but you want to claim that your half an anecdote makes the GP's anecdote "not true"? These English and logic things are new for you, eh?
Re: Did this problem make it better than the usual (Score:1)
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).
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Computer down (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
However, they had to look up prices on the website using their personal phones, since most items just had bar codes
Did you offer to help them... with the Amazon app?
Southwest did a pretty good job (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.
Freaking Nightmare (Score:1)
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...
CALL SCORPION (Score:2)
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.
Why the delay? (Score:2)
Re: Why the delay? (Score:2)
Most people print their boarding passes at home. Due to the outage, they couldn't do everyone had to wait in line at the airport.