Southwest's Facebook discount backfires

DALLAS -- Southwest Airlines' attempt to thank its Facebook friends with a half-price ticket sale backfired when customers were inadvertently billed multiple times for a single flight.

"No, it wasn't a hack, it was just a technology glitch in our system that caused" duplicate bookings and billings to customers' debit and credit cards, Ashley Dillon, a Southwest spokeswoman, said Saturday.

The company became aware of the problem around 5 p.m. Friday, she said, when they experienced website slowdowns and saw that customers were having to repeatedly refresh pages to take advantage of the airlines' one-day "luv2like" promotion.

The special sale designed to celebrate Southwest's reaching the 3 million mark in Facebook fans was supposed to give customers who booked flights on Friday a 50 percent discount on certain fares.

Instead, hundreds of frustrated would-be fliers wound up posting stories on Facebook about how their credit and debit cards were being repeatedly charged, in some cases 20 or more times for a single flight. They tweeted and blogged about the related financial hassles, which ranged from drained checking accounts and bounced checks to overdrawn credit limits and canceled bank cards.

Several complained of having to wait hours on the telephone when they called to speak to customer service representatives. -- AP