Well computer glitches are amongst us and as the the article states the company worked quickly to fix the errors but one woman said it emptied out her checking account and of course that could happen. 
Similarities here with Facebook IPO in the fact that an unusually high amount of traffic was created due to the response. Are we maxing out with not being able to scale these days? Seems like it. I’m sure the hope was to fill up some empty seats and no problem with that but again “Killer Algorithms” can attack at any time.
No more will I use the word glitch <grin> to describe instances as such, as that is way to vague today. In the case of Knight Capital they didn’t adequately test their software or were running a beta test live unknowingly, have heard both stories. That big news breaker was Chapter 37.
No Pity For Knight Capital As Code Made the Markets and It Will Also Destroy the Markets–Let The Quants Choke As They Should Run No Code Before It’s Time For Sake of Greed and Money To Be First To Grab a Dollar–Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 37
The last time I had written about the airline was relative to their “customer of size” policy which was a bit controversial and I might guess the special prices were perhaps not for folks in this area:) Celebrating 3 million Facebook friends turned out to be not what they expected and after all who cares how many friends a site has on Facebook and it is far less than a reason to celebrate, just fly the planes and keep them on time. When it comes down to it, nobody really cares how many friends social networks have unless it’s your own and you might want to work on getting more. It’s always the quality of readers anyway and not quantity.
“Customer of Size Policy” at Southwest Airlines Bumps Film Director Kevin Smith Off the Flight
Back in October of 2011 I started writing about Killer Algorithms and they can be both, designed or rogue for consumers. Have you been attacked? The link below goes to the firs 35 Chapters with public examples that occur in every day life. Some people don’t get jobs due 
to this coupled with the growing amount of “flawed data” that is on the rise due to using credible information queried with non credible data. It’s fine to crunch numbers but when you use credible and non credible together and bring it down to an actual “scoring capability” of consumers, watch out as the flaws are there. Shoot Netflix predictive algorithm is only 60% and we have folks on the web taking the algorithms mostly created for profit as gospel? Houston we have a problem. BD
Attack of the Killer Algorithms–Digest & Links for 35 Chapters–on How Math and Crafty Formulas Today Running on Servers 24/7 Make Life Impacting Decisions About You–Updated 6-24-2012
An effort by Southwest Airlines to celebrate reaching 3 million Facebook friends turned into a public-relations mess when passengers who tried to buy discounted flights Friday ended up with multiple bookings and multiple charges because of a computer glitch.
To celebrate the Facebook milestone, Southwest offered flights of up to 50% off, with several restrictions.
But the airline's online system malfunctioned in response to an unusually high number of bookings from passengers hoping to take advantage of the deals Friday.
On it's Facebook page, Southwest said the response from customers "created website performance issues at various times during the day." The airline said extra staff was called in over the weekend to address the problem.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-southwest-airlines-20120805,0,1443097.story
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