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Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage
- JCM9 11mo agoTotal non statement… the statement on the IT outage is that we had an IT outage.
- abnercoimbre 11mo ago"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are: - providing hotel accommodations; - arranging for ground transportation; - providing meal vouchers; and - arranging for air transportation on another air carrier or foreign air carrier to the passenger’s destination; as appropriate, based on your circumstances."
- jabiko 11mo agoThat's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
- galaxy_gas 11mo agohttps://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisories#it-outage https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori... It is on top of the page and linked a in it
- jabiko 11mo agoAh, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification. Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
- margalabargala 11mo agoThe confusion from people who declined to read the webpage? Most people will read both the comment and webpage, or neither. In either case there's no problem. It's only your uncommon case of reading the comment, not reading the webpage, and yet still feeling confident in making assertions about the webpage contents, where there's an issue. But that's not common, and I daresay the issue is not on OP's end.
- mikestew 11mo agoStill I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion. There’s a link at the top of Alaska Air’s home page. But your first thought was to go search Google instead?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ctz 11mo agoWelcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information.
- msl 11mo agoAnd conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoSo, summing this all up: (1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part; (2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation"; (3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source. That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.
- msl 11mo agoYou will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted. Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable. [1] https://news.alaskaair.com/on-the-record/alaska-statement-on-it-outage/ https://news.alaskaair.com/on-the-record/alaska-statement-on... [2] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisories#it-outage https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori...
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
- strotter 11mo agoThe last sentence on the statement page contains a link to a "flexible travel policy" page, which contains the above quoted text.
- tschwimmer 11mo agoI was affected. Taking off now for a 5:30pm PT flight to Seattle. Aside from clearly not having an appropriate disaster readiness plan, communication was bad even though some information was readily available. For example, there was an inbound ground stop for KSEA for hours, but it was never announced to passengers. We were very lucky the crew was fresh, and there was no discussion of when they would time out. I happened to find out that the crew had lots of time left so I decided to stay but at least a dozen people gave up and left. Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
- chroncueow 11mo ago[flagged]
- anonymous908213 11mo agoTravel insurance is -EV. For the average person who uses it, they will spend more than they recoup. Otherwise the insuring company holding their policy would, you know, not be in business. I don't think there's very much skill in opting in to a -EV bet. The purpose of insurance is to avoid catastrophic losses, which is not a factor in this anecdote.
- heolo739 11mo ago[flagged]
- anonymous908213 11mo agoYour mental faculties are not very well developed, it seems. Card counting is a skill. You gain an edge by being good at a simple game. You have direct influence over the outcome. Ditto the usage of credit cards. It is in no way comparable to insurance. Your only influence over the outcome is to commit fraud (which is in itself a massively -life EV proposition). You are at an unbelievable information disadvantage, because the insurance companies are the ones holding all of the cards and have counted them thoroughly. You have not actually posited a way to gain an advantage in taking traveler's insurance. If it were a skill issue, you would have elaborated on the skills required to do so. Instead you simply suggested that having traveler's insurance at all is a skill issue, and when called out, deflected to completely irrelevant topics.
- ohdeardear 11mo ago[dead]
- zkmon 11mo agoWas there any impact on the flights in air?
- isatis 11mo agoSeveral reported having to be diverted, and I think in one case a flight that left JFK had to return to JFK while over the midwest: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA31 https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA31
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> Several reported having to be diverted How does that work? What is it about a computer outage in your parent company that affects whether you're able to make an already-scheduled landing?
- rkomorn 11mo agoI'm guessing any/some/all of: - Whether parent company has the capacity to service your plane at the landing location - Whether parent company has the capacity to handle boarding new passengers for the next flight at landing location - Whether parent company can get next flight off the ground from landing location - "Risk" management by sending planes and passengers where parent company thinks it has better ability to recover to normal operations - And probably a bunch more only people who work in that industry would think of
- ralph84 11mo agoNo flights were departing their gates in SEA so presumably it was turned around to avoid gridlock at SEA due to no gates available.
- PrairieFire 11mo agoThe diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
- consumer451 11mo agoFor reporting from people who were stuck on tarmacs across the PNW see: https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wide_outage_at_seatac_for_alaska_airlines/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
- jefurii 11mo agoThis is the other big thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AlaskaAirlines/comments/1oehxxv/who_else_sitting_on_a_grounded_flight/?sort=new https://old.reddit.com/r/AlaskaAirlines/comments/1oehxxv/who...
- Hilift 11mo agoNo details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.
- yuvadam 11mo agoInteresting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
- asplake 11mo agoAre you saying that it isn’t always DNS?
- gjvc 11mo agothis is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
- dotancohen 11mo agoIf I'm managing a small company and I absolutely do not want to have this issue, what should I learn?
- colonCapitalDee 11mo agoAutorotate everything
- dotancohen 11mo agoThank you
- alaskalol 11mo agoThey ran a project to try to modernize that but it is still very far behind. Many certs are manually updated and only discovered broken when they expired and due to 2 year max on azure (or is it 18 months) it's happening more and more now.
- jherskovic 11mo agoI was affected as well. My IAH->SEA 7:10 PM Central flight took off 4 hours late. It’s 4 AM central and we’re just descending to land in Seattle. Communication from the airline was basically nonexistent and the poor ground crews didn’t get any information either. I thought we wouldn’t even take off because of crew time limits, but we were lucky to have a fresh one. The system apparently came back and died several times before we could take off. We pushed away from the gate because the system was working and then had to wait on the tarmac for an hour because the system was down again. Not a fun day for air travelers.
- sans_souse 11mo agoHow exactly does an IT outage occur yet not be linked to any "other events?" Can we really use the phrase "IT outage" as if it's an explaination in and of itself?
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo agoWell, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
- bux93 11mo agoThe alternative is seeing a news report that says "Sabotage by hostile nation and/or terrorists not ruled out!" - obviously the airline will do root-cause analysis and find out who screwed the pooch.
- dvdbloc 11mo agoHas anyone else noticed their website has been having a ton of issues in the last few weeks as well? In terms of bookings failing and trips not appearing? Just my anecdote but software issues seem to have become very frequent over there…
- m-ee 11mo agoThey’ve always been pretty bad but it feels worse post Hawaiian merger
- hamonrye 11mo ago[dead]
- PrairieFire 11mo agoA lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future. A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period: Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse July 2024 Delta 5 day outage August 2025 United weight and balance outage June 2025 American outage October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
- duxup 11mo agoWhat amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details. It's like once it goes down all state is lost and for a long time, often days, crews describe having to call in and wait while they figure it out who does what / goes where. I don't like to oversimplify, but it really seems like a solvable problem ...
- gmm1990 11mo agoIs there a public generic measure of IT outages with historical data. Severe outages seem to be more common lately, but I don't have any data to back it up.
- sandorscribbles 11mo agoi have applied and interviewed at AlaskaAir in order to help my "hometown" airline + get free travel. its not shocking to state they are a very ancient infrastructure that is being run and protected by fiefdoms that refuse to even acknowledge best practices of any infrastructure tech released in the past decade. as a former business traveler of AlaskaAir, i stopped flying on them after the 6th flight in a row that was either delayed hours, or never showed up, with no humans at the gate to even provide updates. one of those flights was because Alaska Air had not trained their ground crews how to de-ice the plane and refused to use the deice-as-a-service, stubbornly keeping it in-house, which had their entire Alaska flight grounded at KSEA for an entire day for a light dusting of snow. the AlaskaAir app would consistently route me to the wrong gate, for a flight that was still two hours away, shouting notifications that boarding was closing. i used FlightAware and ignored the AlaskaAir app as it is completely worthless. now with their merger with Hawaiian Air the plan (from an insider) is to ignore all of Hawaiians modern-ish infra and just slam everything into Alaskas ancient tech stack. and if you are still not convinced, research how long Alaska Air was running without a Chief Safety Officer, before and after, Flight 261, and thought it was fine. a true disaster of an airline from the infrastructure culture to the safety culture. i now keep applying just to get on a call with anyone infra related to shout at them for ruining that hometown airline.
- sandorscribbles 11mo agoto make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".
- Schiendelman 11mo ago90 minutes? I live in south Seattle - Link from downtown Seattle takes half that. It's crazy to drive on I-5 and you don't have to.
- HardwareLust 11mo agoOf course not a word as to what they fucked up to cause this in the first place.
- cyanydeez 11mo agoare you surprised? We're not exactly heading in the transparency-first direction; quite the opposite.
- djoldman 11mo agoNot the main topic, but as I was in the network tab, I noticed that the page is ~3.3MB compressed, 2.4MB of which is the "Alaska Hawaiian" svg logo here: https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska-Hawaiian-Dual-Brand-Logo.svg https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska... :(
- indrora 11mo agoI was curious why and the answer is stupider than you'd think: The circle in the image is an embedded PNG which has not been pngcrushed at all. Instead of building a few gradients out, it looks like whoever did the export to svg out of Illustrator or whatever let it export this horrendously large circle. With a gradient. That costs 2.5MB.
- djoldman 11mo agoLooks like that's accurate. Deleting the png from the defs makes the svg 11kb.
- tencentshill 11mo agoMaybe it's an easy way to speed up the page load if the boss ever asks them to. You have to carve out a few CYA options when working for a hostile manager.
- alaskalol 11mo agoE-comm team has the highest turn over, maybe it is an easy CYA fix, maybe they just followed whatever design said the logo should be. Great catch though.
- x0x0 11mo agoFor your convenience, some moron used the entire above-the-fold on a 16-in mbp to tell you what site you're on with a png.
- tobinfekkes 11mo agoMy 6pm flight got delayed and delayed and delayed...until 3am... Then got cancelled because the crew timed out. Back at the airport waiting again now.
- schainks 11mo agoWow, Alaska paying peanuts for relatively mission critical software/SRE roles: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...
- titanomachy 11mo agoAnd in Seattle, where engineer salaries are among the highest in the country.
- schainks 11mo agoIf all you have is peanuts...
- qwertyuiop_ 11mo agoSouthwest, Alaska, United, Delta you name it they are all WITCH outsourcing darlings. We have seen and will continue to see yearly outages.
- abetaha 11mo agoI was affected by the outage yesterday, and my flight to Seattle was delayed by over 6 hours, arriving in Seattle at 3am today. What made the delay much worse is the lack of clear communication and updates throughout the delay. As a consolation, the passengers got a 1-day redeemable $12 meal credit at the airport enough for a bag of chips and a small chocolate bar, which lightened the situation as it put into perspective how ridiculous the prices are at the airport.
- Razengan 11mo ago> which lightened the situation as it put into perspective how ridiculous the prices are at the airport. Stop giving that kind of shit a pass by making "light" of it, what the hell We're literally living a dystopia
- onetokeoverthe 11mo ago[dead]
- caphector 11mo agoI had a similar delay and was given $24, which was enough for an entrée at an airport restaurant.
- fuzzythinker 11mo ago$12 isn't even enough for a proper meal. It needs to be at least double that. Who in the right mind authorized that? How many customers of that airline were affect? Say it's 90k, that's trading a meager $1M for angrier customers and dozens of complains and bad reviews.
- Lucian6 11mo ago[dead]
- alaskalol 11mo agoFor Alaska, that is not accurate. They did a complete migration off any on premise data center around 2023 for Sabre* there are on prem DC for other things but not for GDS. Hawaiian uses Amadeus, so also not any intergration issue. What happens and why Alaska usually has the most issues in October is it's PIP season, some people got culled. Also some new hires too. This specific ITS though pushed through a change without proper CM/CAB earlier this week. But that's all I can write
- p_ing 11mo agoI enjoyed running around the Amdahl machines in the RAD building when I was a kid.
- andrewl 11mo agoMany air traffic control systems are also running on old hardware and software, which can include floppy disks. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/nx-s1-5424682/air-traffic-control-overhaul https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/nx-s1-5424682/air-traffic-con...
- Aloha 11mo agoTPF as far as I can tell has never caused an issue with downtime. When delta had their big outage deltamatic/deltaterm was still chugging along, but no one could log into it because all the windows machines were down.
- perpil 11mo agoMy read of this: https://www.alaskaair.com/content/about-us/customer-commitment/customer-commitment-delay-care https://www.alaskaair.com/content/about-us/customer-commitme... indicates you should be able to get a discount code of $50 if your flight was delayed 3 hours if you ask them.
- fijiaarone 11mo agoThe increasing incompetence and rapid decline into an illiterate, superstitious, tribalistic dark age almost makes me believe that we could have actually have been capable of going to the moon a few generations ago.