I'm a regular flyer with them since they have the ideal route for visiting my other half. Naturally the news about them cancelling 2% of their flights over the course of the next six weeks was a bit of a concern.

So, one of my flights was cancelled. I got an e-mail first, clicked the 'Rebook' link, found the flight looking not cancelled, checked in for it (I thought this might prompt it to sort itself out), got a boarding pass, then - some minutes later - reloaded the page and found it saying it was cancelled. It offered me a button for selecting a different flight, but wouldn't enable the 'Continue' button once I did. I did some poking around and discovered a 500 Internal Server Error in the AJAXy thing they do prior to enabling that button. I wonder if I am a special case since I checked in at the most race-conditiony time, or whether everyone who checked in was unable to do anything.

Their call centre is completely swamped. I was on hold for about hour, got cut off, and have been on hold again for 40 minutes. Now this has happened too:

{"name":"611049","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/8\/886c8c8c27c33f58c1ff0420f231aaf2.png","w":1469,"h":880,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/8\/886c8c8c27c33f58c1ff0420f231aaf2"}

Does that mean they've spotted the 500s, and/or the call centre complaints of the website not working, and are working late trying to fix it?

One of my uncancelled flights is tomorrow. Good time to be up all night, eh?

I was missing easyJet anyway. Airbus planes are cuter than Boeing ones [EDIT: and I think the seats give better support]. The main problem is that they don't fly quite as ideal a route. Still, maybe I'll go back to them - let's see how the news reporting on Ryanair goes over the next few weeks and months.

EDIT: Eurowings do fly an ideal route - they cost a bit more though... But hey, that means you have a feeling they pay their pilots properly Also, this is a treasure trove: Ryanair thread on PPRuNe

EDIT: website's back, but when I look for a flight to switch to, it pretends there aren't any flights. Maybe they've cancelled them all now!

EDIT: well that's interesting. In the Ryanair app, which isn't aware of cancellations, I have two boarding passes. I had checked in for that flight ages ago, and I used the half processed state of the cancellation to check in again. Why the %&£# did I think that was a good idea?

Thank you for the kind words

So, I made a fresh booking with the necessary replacement flight. It's possible to binary-search the number of remaining seats available by varying the number of passengers in your booking, and I established that one of the two possibilities only had three seats left and the other only two (or thereabouts). By the time I was on the way to the airport for yesterday's (uncancelled) flight, the two I mentioned were full up.

In theory I should be able to claim that cost back, since their site was supposed to let me do it free of charge - and that should be in addition to the statutory compensation for any cancelled or sufficiently disrupted flight. I did a preliminary investigation of the online claims form and guess what - it crashed

On the flight, here's what the cheesy landing jingle (should have) said:

Last year, over 90% of our flights arrived on time.
This year, over 90% of our flights arrived.