Ryanair apologise for 'technical difficulties' with 'sarcasm detector' after staff duped by comedian

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Ryanair apologised for "technical difficulties" with their "sarcasm detector" after staff failed to get an Irish comedian's tweet complaining the airline was forcing a woman to pay extra for her “emotional baggage”.

Ryan Hand tweeted at the airline: “What a disgrace, there’s a woman crying at the @Ryanair check in desk who’s been made to pay more for emotional baggage”.

Within two minutes of him posting the tweet, Mr Hand received the following reply from Ryanair staff: “Hi Ryan, which airport is this happening at? IK” on 29 December.

The joke was then compounded by Mr Hand, 27, who retweeted their response and asked his followers to do the same. It has now been retweeted over a 1,000 times and ‘favourited’ over 700 times.

The airline responded to The Independent, writing in a statement: “As the fastest responding airline on Twitter in Europe, we pride ourselves on the speed of our customer service.”

They added: “We apologise for temporary technical difficulties with our sarcasm detector today.”

Ryanair has never been particularly successful on the social media network. In 2013 CEO Michael O’Leary endured a car crash Twitter Q&A which saw users attack him for his airline’s bad customer service among other things.