Recent Flight Cancellations Reveal Alaska Airlines’ Tech Troubles

In the last four months, Alaska Airline has had two major IT disruptions. This resulted in grounding all Alaska Airlines planes for several hours for each occurrence. The resulting cost to the company and inconvenience to their passengers was not insignificant. 

So, what are they going to do? 

Alaska Airlines has decided to bring in outside consultants. Experts in IT technology to review their entire process and infrastructure.  

According to Seattletimes.com,
‘Alaska has not provided any details, or answered any questions, about what caused Thursday’s outage. It’s not clear if the two IT outages this year are related, or even if they occurred at the same data center. Alaska also did not specify if Thursday’s IT outage was hardware-related, like the one in July.’ 

At SeaTac Airport last week. Alaska Airlines were required to cancel 115 flights on Thursday (10/23) and an additional 95 flights on Friday (10/24). 

Hawaiian Airlines, now owned by Alaska Airlines, was not impacted by this outage. 

It's just another reminder of how we are tied to Information technology and how fragile it really is. You can have one minor problem in one system, and it impacts multiple others. 

It's not unusual for airline systems to combine older and newer IT technology. Getting older and newer IT systems to communicate with each other can be problematic and it can get worse if the business decides to save money on upgrading their IT in order to put that money towards other services. 

The only bright side of this is that these IT issues do not affect the safety of travel, just the convenience. Try to imagine the collective dissatisfaction of customers when 115 flights in one day are cancelled. 

I guess the big question is, how much money will you save on cancelled flights if you spend that extra money to improve your IT system and its security.
Alaska Airlines to review IT systems after 2 outages in four months | The Seattle Times