United.com Broken

11 November 2008 · problem, United, web

So I have this trip coming up to San Diego, and I fly tomorrow. I get this friendly little Web-2.0 e-mail from United. It comes from an address in a subdomain of p0.com, telling me that United are using Yesmail, and it includes a link for me to follow to "view my complete itinerary". They even have it link to a server in the p0.com domain so my browser doesn't think this is a phishing attack. The only problem comes when I click on the link, and repeatedly see

Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

"Not to worry", I think to myself, "I'm a United frequent flyer (God help me), so I can just log in to my Mileage Plus account and check my itinerary there". Of course this wouldn't have been much of a post if that had worked, but good old United didn't let me down. Every attempt to log in gives me

Redirect Loop
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

Attempts to retry just bring up the same message again. Wonderful. Let's hope the people who run the web site have nothing to do with keeping the 'planes flying.

[PS: Fortunately this appeared to be a transient condition. The site now responds normally.]