Continental.com went down for about two hours yesterday afternoon because of an unspecified technical issue.
The airline, of course, has a lot of East Coast routes, so it wasn't a timely outage from travelers' perpective as many were coping with Hurricane Earl and reworking flight plans on the eve of the Labor Day weekend.
"We had some technical difficulty with our Web site yesterday afternoon that was resolved within two hours," says spokeswoman Julie King. "The site was taken offline at about 1:45 p.m. and back online at 3:40 p.m.
When the website went offline yesterday, the airline tweeted: "We’re working to resolve a technical issue on continental.com. Sorry for any inconvenience & thanks for your patience."
The all-clear was given on Twitter a couple of hours later. "We’ve resolved the technical issues with continental.com. We appreciate your patience & again apologize for any inconvenience."
As with other airlines affected by Hurricane Earl, Continental has used Twitter to update passengers about weather-related changes to its change-fee policies.
As the hurricane was making its way up the East Coast of the U.S. today, Continental tweeted: "We’ve added Eastern U.S. cities eligible for change fee waivers due to Hurricane Earl. See policy http://bit.ly/bUEvHq"
One exception has been AirTran, which communicated with travelers on its website about its change-fee waivers, but hasn't mastered Twitter yet.
The lone Tweet from @AirTran was on Oct. 20, 2009: "Welcome to @AirTran. Start following us now, we’ll be tweeting with you soon."
AirTran's Twitter bio states: "Welcome to the official AirTran Twitter feed. Please contact Customer Service at 1-800-AIR-TRAN for urgent concerns."