Why do unavailable seats follow me on Delta

Question

I will be flying soon on the same flight as someone I know, but we booked separately. I was hoping that we could adjust our seat selections so that we could sit next to each other, but for some reason when I select desirable rows, the available seat(s) next to me suddenly become "unavailable" (X'd out). You can see an example of two locations in the airplane where this happened below. I've never experienced this before. Why do they seem to want to hold the seat next to me, no matter where I sit?

(Note, if you are unfamiliar with Delta seat maps, the green seat is me -- I have redacted my initials for privacy)

Answer 1

This seems like a temporary seat block to give you the chance to buy the seat next to you, which you can do through booking management in delta website. Some passengers buy two seats next to each other for extra comfort.

The blocked seat(s) should be unblocked after sometime, or after you check-in online. A similar process is being implemented in the airline I work for.

Answer 2

Until May of this year, Delta was purposefully blocking middle seats in an attempt to reduce spread of Covid-19.

From a twitter search, it almost appears as though they're informally doing this, by perhaps selling middle seats later in the process.

Answer 3

You could try clearing your cache & cookies on your browser. Or using Tor with the Brave browser. That way they can't track you.

To open a Tor window in Brave, click on the hamburger in the top right of the screen & select "New private window with Tor". Be advised, you may have to jump through some hoops to get into your site (Capchas mostly), but your IP will have been routed through any number of servers to get there, so they'll have no idea who you are or what you've done on their site previously.

Good luck!