Southwest Cancels 57 Flights After Computer Glitch

Full service was restored just after 2 a.m. EDT Saturday, but the Dallas-based airline is still working to clear a backlog of flights and reposition planes and crew.

The airline — the country's largest domestic carrier — canceled 43 flights Friday night and another 14 Saturday morning.

Southwest is the latest airline to ground flights because of a large computer outage. But its problem was minor compared to those experienced by two competitors — thanks in part to its late-day timing.

In April, American Airlines grounded all of its flights nationwide for several hours due to computer problems. The airline ultimately canceled 970 flights. And last year, United Airlines had two major outages: one in August delayed 580 flights; another in November delayed 636 flights.

The problem was detected around 11 p.m. EDT Friday, Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins said. It impaired the airline's ability to do such things as conduct check-ins, print boarding passes and monitor the weight of each aircraft. Some flights were on the taxiway and diverted back to the terminal, Hawkins said. Flights already in the air were unaffected.

Most of Southwest's cancelations Friday night were in the western half of the country, according to airline spokeswoman Michelle Agnew. Saturday's cancelations were scattered across the U.S. They included planes leavings from Minneapolis, Chicago, Phoenix, Denver and San Diego, according to flight tracking service FlightAware.

Southwest flies an average of 3,400 flights each day.

Agnew said in an email Saturday morning that the airline's technology team is "still working to confirm the source of the issue."

Shortly after 2 a.m., Southwest posted on its Twitter page that "systems are operating and we will begin work to get customers where they need to be. Thanks for your patience tonight."

Agnew said the computer system was "running at full capacity" by early Saturday. Before that, though, officials used a backup system that was much more sluggish.

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AP Airlines Writer Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed to this report.

Woodside Petroleum Cancels Onshore L.N.G. Project in Australia

Global energy companies have invested $140 billion in six L.N.G. plants in just two and one-half years as Australia has increased production on its way to becoming the largest exporter of the gas in the world.

But investors’ interest in the sector in Australia has cooled recently because of huge costs overruns and in the face of rising competition from North America, where huge new supplies of gas have been tapped from shale.

Woodside’s canceled onshore project, called Browse, had been expected to export enormous amounts of liquified gas to Asia. The shelving of Browse as an onshore plant could spell an end to new onshore gas projects in Australia in favor of offshore plants that can be built at a lower cost and face fewer environmental and landowner hurdles.

“This decision will surprise few, as the proposed onshore development always looked too economically, technically, environmentally and socially risky for too little reward,” analysts at the bank Macquarie said in a research note.

Woodside also appears to be pivoting its focus toward North America, confirming Friday that it had lodged an expression of interest in developing a Canadian L.N.G. project.

Browse was to be Woodside’s biggest such onshore L.N.G. development yet, but it had been plagued by controversy over its proposed location at James Price Point on Australia’s northwest coast, coming under fire from environmentalists and some indigenous landowners.

The site is home to the world’s largest dinosaur footprints and sacred Aboriginal sites.

Peter Coleman, the chief executive of Woodside, said any new development would have to provide significant cost savings, adding: “Our customers are saying to us very clearly, ‘No longer can we pay for your expensive projects.”’

Many in the industry consider a floating L.N.G. plant to be the most likely fallback plan.

Analysts at JP Morgan have estimated that a floating project would mean a 20 percent saving in costs, resulting in a capital expenditure of $35.5 billion, versus $44.6 billion for the onshore development option.

Estimates of the cost of the onshore plant vary, but some analysts had said it could be as much as $48 billion.

Of seven L.N.G. plants under construction in Australia, all of which are due to come online in 2014 or later, four have already announced budget blowouts ranging from 15 percent to 40 percent.

Woodside owns a 31 percent stake in Browse, which it is developing with Royal Dutch Shell, BP, PetroChina, Mitsui and Mitsubishi.

Shares in Woodside, which has a market value of about $30 billion, rose 3 percent on expectations it would develop a less expensive option, but Chiyoda of Japan, which has a contract for the Browse project, tumbled 11 percent.

Building a floating plant in Asia and towing it into place off the coast of Western Australia would be likely to save billions of dollars in construction costs.

Earlier this month, Exxon Mobil and BHP Billiton disclosed plans to build the world’s largest floating L.N.G. vessel off northwestern Australia, producing six million to seven million tons of liquified gas per year, starting in 2020 or 2021.

Browse had been aiming for 12 million tons per year.

Shell, which owns 24 percent of Woodside, has not publicly supported a floating L.N.G. plant for Browse, but Ann Pickard, chairwoman of Shell Australia, has backed floating L.N.G. plants as a good solution for the problems with high costs in Australia.

Ms. Pickard has also championed the plants as a way for Australia to make revenues faster, though unions and politicians in Australia are worried about job losses from going offshore.

Another joint venture partner, PetroChina, said Friday that it was still deciding whether it would invest in Browse and that it was studying the project’s feasibility.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the decision had been a commercial one and was not the end of the nearly decade-long boom in resources in the country.

“We haven’t seen the peak of the investment phase into resources yet. And we are yet to see the peak of the production phase,” Mr. Gillard said in Sydney. “So we will be seeing the resources boom at work in our economy for a long time to come.”

Facebook Cancels Shortcut Over Concern for Security

SAN FRANCISCO — What was supposed to be a shortcut for Facebook users to log into their pages ended up exposing their e-mail addresses — and, in some cases, potentially allowing access to their accounts as well.

A Facebook spokesman said on Friday that the company had created the shortcut, called auto login, to let some users go directly to their pages by clicking on a Web link sent to their e-mail addresses. Once they clicked on the link, they could get into their accounts, rather than having to go to Facebook.com and log in.

Some of the links required users to type their passwords, while others did not, the company said.

On the Web site Hacker News, a technology discussion board, Matt Jones, an engineer at Facebook, said the company had offered the service for “ease of use” and never made the Web addresses “publicly available.”

But they did become publicly available, as the discussion on Hacker News revealed on Friday.

The Facebook spokesman, Frederic Wolens, said some users may have posted the links on the Web, allowing anyone to search for them. Those links could give a stranger access to the Facebook pages connected to them, as well as the e-mail addresses of those users. Mr. Wolens said he had no explanation why someone would post the links.  

When Facebook found the problem, it discontinued the shortcut.

The Hacker News thread said over one million Facebook accounts had been affected. Facebook could not confirm that figure on Friday afternoon.

TrendMicro, a private security company that offers safety tools for Facebook users, said Web address shortcuts were inherently dangerous because they could ultimately end up on the Web.

“Many, many hackers are targeting these portals because of the ubiquitous trust and use of them,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president for cybersecurity at TrendMicro. He added, “You don’t take shortcuts through the woods in cyberspace.”

The news of the security hole comes a week after a Bulgarian blogger, Bogomil Shopov, said he had bought 1.1 million Facebook users’ names and e-mail addresses on the Web for $5. He found the information for sale on a marketplace site, gigbucks.com. The items are no longer available.

Mr. Wolens of Facebook said the data had been acquired and compiled by someone who took whatever information Facebook users made public on their pages — and from other publicly available data about those users.

Mr. Kellermann of TrendMicro said the problem with the shortcut could explain how the names and e-mail addresses that Mr. Shopov had found became public. Facebook said the security flaw and the user data for sale had nothing to do with each another.

“We have no reason whatsoever to believe that these two incidents are related,” Mr. Wolens said.