bmrisko

Just booked two upcoming flights on Delta...they apparently want my money. This is one of the worst online screw-ups I have ever witnessed.

Texas Booster

Unable to login at all through Chrome, IE or Firefox.

How do fliers let Internet access on WN planes if they can't login?

goghd

This is very bad-- been trying to log into my RR account to change a couple of flights since 6AM today.

Called and waited over an hour and gave up.

SWA had better extend the sale thru the weekend and fix there system. Your IT department better have some people fired over this. Hire better skilled IT folks. Maybe even a top notch department head.

rtalk25

And hire lower paid less skilled H1Bs like Disney just did.

Some in IT might be partially at fault but sometimes the cheapness for labor, resources, technology and budgeting comes from higher up.

Southwest charges regularly over $100 advance Wanna Get Away one-way now on a route like BWI-RDU or BWI-PIT and then for maybe for 5 days of the year or less, it has a $49 sale for the route. Such drastic discounting in a very time constrained period will cause a huge uptick in website traffic. Revenue management likely didn't anticipate that the website couldn't handle the volume.

northy989

I had hope when I woke up this morning at 6 am MDT and was actually able to log in to RR for the first time in 24 hours - but still cannot conduct the non-sale related business I need to (add CP for flight next week). I've been trying for three days now. :-(

mke9499

WORKING!

If you have been waiting and frustrated about not being able to log in and do points booking, or change reservations, try now.

Both sothwest.com and mobile app working!

DebitNM

DONE! And got all the same prices I had been seeing since day 1. Phew! Hope everyone else manages to get what they need to do taken care of - 6:15 am MDT via laptop.

Booked [2] - one way RR tickets. Able to log into my RR acct with no effort; points and existing reservations intact.

ejmelton

Last night I was able to book three new reservations online. (Earlier, I had to give up on the telephone after 90 minutes due to family dinner. I don't know which was worse, rush hour traffic or listening to the SWA hold music over my cell phone. )

However, I couldn't include our RR numbers.

So this morning we could add the RR numbers (I went through the email links.) and then log into the account. Ten minutes later (instantly in "Southwest time") the reservations were there.

Still can't add companion reservations.

But we are getting closer...until the next booking deadline gets near.

And, for the record, every flight that I wanted has been available at a great price.

snoopoz

I had to book MDW-LAS for next week, and by the time I was able to buy a ticket the price had gone up $100. Thanks!

nineworldseries

Am I allowed to complain that the calendar search function still doesn't work?

Edit: Whoa... never mind! This just popped back on about 9:00 Eastern.

Edit: Aaand... gone again

bon95

It doesn't work, can't log on. Had to pay for it and will be asking for a refund.

nsx

The site appears to operating normally now. It's miraculous, I know. I just booked one Standard Award ticket and two tickets using points, and I canceled two reservations. None of that functionality was available yesterday.

joshua362

We all belong to a discussion board. In the absence of hard data, announcements or the truth (remember the unannounced extra scheduling snafu of 2013 - adding the equivalent of 16 planes with of flights without the 16 planes ?), we are going to speculate and discuss.

What a huge, epic fail.

But when you are down to only 4 majors, any ramification is going to be short lived.

mke9499

Even though Southwest IT issues have been an epic fail, I think that the WN agents who manned the phones, during the past couple of days, deserve a shout-out for their efforts.

The phone experience I had last night was professional and efficient. I can't possibly imagine the anger and abuse some of them had to endure over the past few days.

texashoser

Of course we speculate, including me. Except there was no evidence Southwest had been hacked. On the contrary, there are reams of evidence that shows poorly handled transitions and on-line functionality losses during sales.

The real speculation is simply on what exact technical problems caused the fiasco and what, if anything, Southwest was going to do about it, not only now, but in the past and future.

If functionality has been restored this morning, and it looks like quite a bit has, it's my contention that Southwest didn't add any more servers or robustness. Based upon what I saw, I still think the problem was databases getting out of sync the result of customers hammering a limited system that depends on the complex interaction between many different databases.

I've personally seen database environments collapse when you've got thousands, if not millions, of read requests hammering a slave server while getting hammered by a master server (who is also getting hammered with writes) trying to ship the slave server transaction logs. It's never a good thing to see a slave server state that it's 3600 seconds (an hour) behind the master. ;-)