Southwest Airlines website fails during holiday travel week

Southwest Airlines’ website failed Tuesday, blocking access to booking and flight check-in tools in a busy holiday travel week. The carrier said it was making progress in fixing the disruption and was getting reports of successful transactions and online check-in attempts around 5:45 pm New York time. The failure affected all customers but didn’t have any impact on flights, the carrier said. “Recovery is underway,” the company said. Southwest told passengers via Twitter to check in using airport kiosks or ticket counters. The site was back online in at least some markets by the late afternoon. Southwest was one of 3 US airlines that suffered a similar disruption Oct 17 when technical difficulties with Sabre computer systems prevented reservations from being made on websites. <br/>