Ryanair Website Outage Jan 28, 2026 Check In Risk
Ryanair has announced a brief, scheduled maintenance window that will take its website and mobile app offline for 30 minutes on January 28, 2026. The airline's notice says the outage runs from 100 a.m. to 130 a.m. UK time, which matters because that is when many travelers try to check in, pull up boarding passes, or make last minute booking fixes before heading to the airport.
The practical change is simple, for that half hour you should assume you cannot rely on Ryanair's online channels. That includes check in steps that require logging in, and it also affects anyone who expects to manage an existing booking right before leaving for the airport, because those tools typically live behind the same web and app systems.
For travelers in the U.S. Central time zone, the timing is easy to miss because it falls on the prior calendar day. 100 a.m. UK time on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 is 700 p.m. CST on Tuesday, January 27, 2026. For much of mainland Europe on Central European Time, it is 200 a.m. to 230 a.m. on January 28.
Who Is Affected
This notice is most relevant to passengers traveling on January 28, 2026 who have not already checked in and stored their boarding pass, plus anyone who expects to adjust a booking close to departure. Travelers on early morning flights in the UK and Ireland are a particularly high exposure group because the maintenance window sits right on the edge of when many people start moving toward the airport.
Passengers who did not pre reserve seats face an additional timing trap. Ryanair's help guidance says that if you have not reserved a seat and one is assigned randomly, check in opens 24 hours before the flight and closes 2 hours before departure. That means you usually have a full day to check in, but it also means procrastinating into the last few hours can back you into the maintenance window in some time zones.
Travelers who booked through an online travel agent can also be more exposed, because extra verification steps can be required before you can check in on Ryanair's site. If you are already dealing with access or error messages, a planned outage removes your ability to troubleshoot in real time during that 30 minute span.
What Travelers Should Do
Check in as soon as your check in window opens, then download your boarding pass to your device and save a backup copy [for example, a screenshot stored offline] so you are not dependent on the app while traveling to the airport.
If you cannot complete check in before the outage, set a hard decision point. If your departure is within a few hours after the maintenance window, or you are traveling with checked bags and a tight bag drop cutoff, treat that as a reason to leave earlier and plan for longer lines at the airport during the rebound period.
Over the next 24 to 72 hours, monitor Ryanair's travel updates and your email or SMS alerts for any change to the maintenance window, and keep your booking details handy in case you need to use airport staff during a short notice disruption.
How It Works
For most Ryanair passengers, the operational risk is not the 30 minute downtime itself, it is how it compresses traveler behavior into the same pre departure hour. When a carrier's website and app are unavailable, online check in and self service booking tools are effectively paused, so passengers who planned to check in late shift to airport counters at the same time, which is how a small digital outage becomes a physical queue problem.
Ryanair's own check in rules explain why timing matters. If you have not reserved a seat and one is assigned randomly, check in opens 24 hours before departure and closes 2 hours before departure. If you reserved a seat, online check in can open much earlier, up to 60 days before departure, which gives you a simple way to avoid day of travel friction.
The second order ripple is what travelers feel at the airport. Even when flights operate normally, a burst of late check ins can increase demand at bag drop points, slow document checks, and push more passengers into help desks for fixes that would usually be done in the app. Once people start missing cutoffs, the problem becomes reaccommodation, rebooking inventory, and unplanned hotel nights, which is why a "tiny" maintenance window is still worth treating as a real operational constraint. If you want a recent example of how quickly queues and option loss build when systems are stressed, see Flight Delays and Airport Impacts: January 25, 2026.