[HN Gopher] Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage
___________________________________________________________________
Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage
Author : fujigawa
Score : 121 points
Date : 2025-10-24 05:32 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.alaskaair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.alaskaair.com)
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| _" 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-
| advisori... It is on top of the page and linked a in it
| jabiko wrote:
| Ah, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| _Still 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?
| ctz wrote:
| Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be
| followed to see related information.
| msl wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| You 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...
|
| [2] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-
| advisori...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose
| Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred
| documents, or just one?
|
| The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on
| the page as being the airline's policy toward affected
| "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have
| found it, because... it's included in the document. It's
| not like the quote was pulled from the "investor
| relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the
| generic site-wide topbar for no reason.
|
| Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel
| policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines
| disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a
| set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to
| offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.
|
| Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel
| policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support
| our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even
| though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy
| is in place to support their guests?
|
| If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct
| link to the correct policy as being "part of the
| document"?
| msl wrote:
| I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me
| state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is
| still about the original comment, that I consider the
| quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and
| relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment
| is not about that.
|
| No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another
| document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I
| don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a
| part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously
| related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the
| former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone
| quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I
| would find it confusing.
|
| As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to
| admit that I don't have much experience with them, but
| from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I
| would not consider the whole book to be a single document
| _when it comes to referencing_. Would it make sense to
| say something like "The adventure in the book ends with
| you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of
| the many alternative endings, one that many might not
| encounter when playing?
|
| And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate
| referencing to say "That is a crime according to the
| French criminal law" without specifying _where_ it says
| that? (I 'm assuming here that the French criminal law is
| a single document.)
|
| The other example is interesting. I would consider a
| wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document,
| but I would not consider erroneous statements in the
| linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the
| linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated
| policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy.
| Would you say that the original document contains
| misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.
|
| [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822
|
| [2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322
| strotter wrote:
| The last sentence on the statement page contains a link to a
| "flexible travel policy" page, which contains the above
| quoted text.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| I 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.
| croemer wrote:
| For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice
| compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR
| (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align
| beyond reputation.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Tell me about it. Swiss air refuses to pay out 1800EUR in
| EC261 compensation...
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| They almost always try that. Save yourself the hassle, use
| one of the online services who will get that money for you.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Plenty of frequent flyers are willing to help for free
| too (I assume a majority of those services take a cut).
| FlyerTalk, Head For Points forums etc
| hexbin010 wrote:
| How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning
| CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to
| consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
|
| Switzerland might have options for small claims court
| claims online too
| benterix wrote:
| Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their
| stance immediately when I put the local office of civil
| aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to
| be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the
| correct official local authority, and they'll do your
| right really quickly.
| jorisboris wrote:
| Had a cancelled flight with Swiss which they claimed was
| birdstrike and hence force majeur. So no compensation ...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Have you filed a complaint with the swiss air regulatory
| authority? I did that when Icelandair didn't comply within
| the allowed timeframe and suddenly they were much more
| forthcoming.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
|
| European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation
| /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies,
| strategies etc to avoid paying out
| Macha wrote:
| I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it
| but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim
| form ("are you sure you're entitled to compensation?" and
| "most claims aren't successful" type stuff), once I did
| fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss,
| despite the payout being larger than the original fare
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Fair enough. It's mostly the 'bigger' long-haul airlines
| I've seen complaints about. But I can also find anecdata
| about Ryanair too without much effort:
|
| https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ryanair/2195574-how-get-
| ryan...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lg6aqp/r
| yan...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1d3908i/i
| _th...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lnjmvm/f
| ile...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1o6muwv/r
| yan...
|
| Every airline plays the game to some degree - it would be
| commercially incompetent to not use every possible angle
| to weasle out of it.
| Nux wrote:
| Got compensations relatively easily out of both Wizzair and
| Ryanair and I loath bureaucracy.
| jddj wrote:
| Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike
| in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out
| of their control and so no compensation is owed.
|
| Then you get the pleasure of a phone tree that only allows
| the option of giving feedback about the noise on the plane or
| the cleanliness.
|
| Then once you get through and manage to plead your case
| you'll get quarterly emails about how your case is in review
| and sorry about the delay but you should have news next week.
|
| Not bitter.
| bobafett-9902 wrote:
| Although a pain, I've had great success by simply asking
| for "some form of compensation" for my delay. They're not
| going to offer you cash back, but you can then push them to
| give future flight credit. I've gotten $30-$150 on average
| depending on the value of the ticket purchased
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Yea, they tend to deflect. Then you send email quoting laws
| and inform them that next email will be trough lawyers, and
| they pay out quick (personal experience)
| buzer wrote:
| In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the
| response I got was that I need to contact the marketing
| carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily
| enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the
| marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was
| cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed &
| I only discovered it when I went to airport).
|
| So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Have you raised a complaint with the regulatory body they
| are registered to? That also works well.
| buzer wrote:
| NEB in Finland is Traficom, but they don't handle
| individual complaints. Those handled by Consumer Advisory
| Services and European Consumer Center & these are
| residence based as far as I understand (I'm Finnish
| citizen but I don't live in EU).
|
| The only alternative to court is Consumer Disputes Board
| but their resolutions are just recommendations & Finnair
| has a long history of ignoring them so spending 2-3 years
| there seems like waste of time.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| In my case, I filed a complaint with Iceland air
| regulatory authority, even though I lived in canada at a
| time, and when I told Icelandair I had done that, they
| suddenly became very proactive.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| The law is clear though, if the airline doesn't comply,
| raise a complaint with the regulatory body of the country
| they are located. Suddenly they become very friendly (been
| there, done that, got all the monies)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If you have a working small claims court system in your
| country - go for that.
| keyle wrote:
| In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they
| approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel
| the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect
| their statistics of delays!
|
| Some other airlines "swap planes" and do swapsies with every
| passengers, on every flights, if they get a morning delay;
| they trickle it down all day long. It's ridiculous seeing
| lines of people moving to another gate, all day. When your
| plane arrive at your gate, you know you're being moved to
| another line and the delayed passengers will get your plane.
| So that way, delays stay within the bounds!
|
| Sickening, I'm never flying these airlines again.
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?
|
| I show up for a flight to Mordor scheduled departure at 8
| am, you for a scheduled departure at 9:30 am.
|
| The plane scheduled for the 8 am departure is unavailable
| (for whatever reason) and there's a plane that can board
| for a 9:30 departure... Shouldn't I get preference since my
| flight was scheduled to leave earlier? When the other plane
| becomes available or is replaced, your flight will go out
| on that (or whatever flight in the swapsies chain).
|
| What alternative would you prefer:
|
| a) Early flight has to wait, maximal delay for those
| passengers trading off with minimal delay for others
|
| b) Something based on class of booking + airline status +
| time of booking, like they use for upgrades. Frequent
| fliers get minimal delay, ultra economy gets maximum delay
|
| c) prefer passengers with connections that haven't yet been
| missed, otherwise a or b? Maybe just prefer passengers
| where makable connections avoid an overnight missed
| connection. This one makes systemic sense, but may not be
| easy to compute.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I 'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?_
|
| Imagine a route with 6 planes a day, 2 hours apart. The
| first flight of the day develops a problem that'll take 3
| hours to repair.
|
| Is it better to delay one plane by 3 hours; pay 200
| passengers compensation; and waste 3x200=600 person-
| hours?
|
| Or to delay six planes by 2 hours; pay no compensation as
| only 3+ hour delays get compensation; and waste
| 6x2x200=2400 person-hours?
| maest wrote:
| Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump
| admin in the US.
|
| I believe the argument is that regulation encumbers airlines
| and, instead, the free market will incentivise participants
| to handle outages and delayed flights in a competitive way.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I literally had to sprint across LIS airport (past the tax-
| free refund counter I had business at) to make an alternate
| flight, after waiting in line for 3 hours.
|
| If I didn't run, I would have missed the alternate, and
| Airfrance would have owed me like 700EUR plus an overnight
| stay with meals. I did them a favor. I requested
| reimbursement for my missed tax refund (which was <100EUR);
| some guy in India told me they weren't legally obligated to
| reimburse me, and closed the ticket.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| That policy and a long delay I had going from Iceland to
| London made the whole airfare for the trip (canada to london
| and back) free. I think I even made money.
|
| However, you have to be insistent, I first filed a complaint
| with the airline, and when they didn't comply in the given
| amount of time, I filed a complaint with their regulatory
| authority, and then suddenly the airline remembered me and
| gave me the money.
| ohdeardear wrote:
| Air travel sucks. [..] I'm sure next time I can take my
| business to a different airline who will also be happy to not
| do any better.
|
| Yes, this is what you get when people don't organize themselves
| politically. You get a fucking nightmare to live in.
|
| I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have
| working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100
| (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay
| for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it
| work. (I am not the problem in this, because I try to be
| politically active when I have time, but humanity is just so
| fucking stupid that it's not even funny; I guess someone should
| invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to
| add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by
| death, because no good deed goes unpunished in this hell
| scape.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the
| water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be
| punishable by death
|
| Why do you think we add iodine to salt?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Mind control?
| zrobotics wrote:
| No, that's what the fluorine in the water is for
| oasisbob wrote:
| Fluoride, the ion, not fluorine the highly reactive
| atomic gas.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Gaseous fluorine is diatomic.
|
| You can't really add a bunch of fluorine ions to water
| because they'd all be negatively charged. We say we're
| adding "fluoride", but really we're adding ionic
| compounds that include fluoride.
|
| This seems analogous to the difference between
| chlorinated water (toxic) and salt water (not at all
| toxic). It's always interesting to me that adding
| chlorine to water makes it poisonous, and adding sodium
| causes it to explode, but adding sodium chloride does...
| nothing in particular.
| ethersteeds wrote:
| Makes it ready for your pasta!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to
| $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that
|
| Which would just flow into the pockets of ClownStrike or some
| big consultancy and nothing would actually change.
| lpapez wrote:
| > I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have
| working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100
| (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay
| for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make
| it work.
|
| Not stupid, just corrupt :)
|
| If we did this, the money would get misappropriated or stolen
| - most likely completely legally through overpaid consulting
| fees.
|
| So clearly we should pay someone to prevent that from
| happening.
|
| Wait a minute...
| thuridas wrote:
| Just by forcing to compensate passengers accordingly they
| would start to care more.
|
| What is the lost productivity for having so many people
| waiting on airports?
|
| But that is consumer protection regulation and it is not
| going to happen in America in a few years
| tehwebguy wrote:
| See if you can get some miles out of it. Alaska miles are still
| some of the most valuable for using on international partners.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Every flight I've taken in the last year has been a
| clusterfuck. I've spent damn near as much time in airports as I
| have in the air.
|
| It seriously makes me not want to fly.
| zkmon wrote:
| Was there any impact on the flights in air?
| isatis wrote:
| Several 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| No flights were departing their gates in SEA so presumably
| it was turned around to avoid gridlock at SEA due to no
| gates available.
| PrairieFire wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| For reporting from people who were stuck on tarmacs across the
| PNW see:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
| jefurii wrote:
| This is the other big thread:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AlaskaAirlines/comments/1oehxxv/who...
| Hilift wrote:
| No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.
| yuvadam wrote:
| Interesting 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 wrote:
| Are you saying that it isn't always DNS?
| gjvc wrote:
| this 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 wrote:
| If I'm managing a small company and I absolutely do not want to
| have this issue, what should I learn?
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| Autorotate everything
| alaskalol wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Has 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 wrote:
| They've always been pretty bad but it feels worse post Hawaiian
| merger
| JCM9 wrote:
| Total non statement... the statement on the IT outage is that we
| had an IT outage.
| PrairieFire wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| i 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 wrote:
| to 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 wrote:
| 90 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.
| sandorscribbles wrote:
| i prefer to arrive to work fresh and not have smoked meth
| or fentanyl the entire train ride not to mention dodging
| random stabbings, homeless feces, and insane people that
| belong in a mental care facility.
| mikestew wrote:
| _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._
|
| Oh, was _that_ the reason we were stuck in Orlando, and the
| only airline that couldn't fly out of SeaTac due to snow that
| day was the one with "Alaska" in its name? (Yes, literally
| every other airline at SeaTac that day was flying, if a bit
| delayed.)
| sandorscribbles wrote:
| yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews
| standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting
| into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse,
| with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking
| off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to
| eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.
| jefurii wrote:
| Nope, no snow in Seattle yesterday.
| mikestew wrote:
| What gave you the impression that this happened yesterday?
| bob1029 wrote:
| > 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
|
| I struggle with the notion that a high quality airline
| operating system cannot be developed using technologies as of
| 2015. Most of what we are drowning in right now is the product
| of the last 10 years.
|
| The last place we need fancy new shit is in air travel. This is
| precisely the kind of thing where you _do_ want to call someone
| like IBM to install a mainframe. Failure of an airline 's IT
| systems can begin to approach the kind of impact you get with a
| payment network outage.
| coliveira wrote:
| The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry.
| American companies don't pay good salaries for people who
| specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you
| mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons
| of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or
| whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished
| tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire,
| and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have
| to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we
| could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because
| they won't pay experienced people to do this.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| Who pays better than American companies for well tested
| technology?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| No one. GP is putting out bunk
| coliveira wrote:
| The drain is not to other countries, but to other
| technologies.
| BeetleB wrote:
| He means they go to other companies.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-
| airlines/salaries/so...
| somat wrote:
| Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the
| 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the
| 30's nothing except radios and the planes.
|
| It's not a tech problem, it's a culture problem. Just because
| the infrastructure is old does not mean that it is bad. The
| main deciding factor is how well it is maintained. But that
| is to hard for many people. So much easier to say "It'S bAd
| bEcAuSe iT is oLd" and walk away.
| Aloha wrote:
| Most are - irony of irony is that when Delta had its big
| outage due to CrowdStrike, dealtamatic/deltaterm was still
| running just fine, but no one could get into it because all
| of their windows machines were locked out.
|
| At the core of most airlines is a customized version of IBM
| TPF, its very reliable and highly available, its all of the
| other stuff that breaks down.
|
| We will in time find out what grounded AS, I wouldnt be
| surprised if its some sort of middleware connecting their
| iPads to the CRS they use for ticketing operations, but it
| could also be something as simple as their weight and
| balance application going offline.
|
| AS is a fairly well run airline (as are DL, AA and UA) with
| a heterogeneous mix of systems in service, ideally this
| heterogeneous nature should make for a more resilient
| system but it also can lead to single points of failure
| when you have to glue too many different systems together.
| sandorscribbles wrote:
| excellent point. at tmobile (circa 2014) it required 87
| APIs be hit to turn on a new subscriber. if the 34th API
| failed, the subscriber had to wait and start over
| clogging up the stores. at the core only 3 or 4 of those
| APIs were crucial to start the service and the rest could
| have been fine with eventual consistency. who is ticketed
| for what flight is the core, the rest dealing with plane
| can be handled manually just like the small airplanes do
| it, manual weight & balance, flight planning, etc. but
| Alaska chooses not to do that and is ok losing millions
| of dollars per day disrupted while losing customers
| because they do not care. and not hiring a safety officer
| for years proves they do not care.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| I am by no means an industry insider, but I'm skeptical of
| your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those
| eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps,
| but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software
| that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane
| positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required
| to compete on price in the modern era.
|
| It's easy to complain about modern airlines (and I do), but
| it's still true that's never been cheaper to fly, and IT
| infrastructure is surely no small part of that.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think the ticketing systems are probably the most
| modern parts of airlines. As far as I know, the tech that
| actually runs the plane does not change very often as it
| needs to go through approval processes.
| azov wrote:
| The ticketing system might very well be the oldest.
|
| AFAIK the very first large-scale commercial deployment of
| what we now call "distributed cloud apps" was SABRE, a
| ticket reservation system built back in 1960s, still in
| use today.
| sandorscribbles wrote:
| that was my point in the purposeful use of the word
| "fiefdom" to describe the Alaska IT culture. it wasn't
| focused on optimal infra state with what it had, it was
| focused on following the cult of the winders wizards that
| refused to acknowledge anything different like Linux.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Oof, Alaska 261 [1]. We say Boeing is bad now, but McDonnell-
| Douglas had a 30-year run of releasing model after model with
| catastrophic and foreseeable engineering defects. (Not to say
| that Alaska was not also extremely culpable in that incident
| too). In that light, the MCAS and door plug fiascos might just
| be Boeing trying to live up to the rich traditions they
| inherited from MD.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
| bsimpson wrote:
| Virgin America was the best airline in the US and they ruined
| it by assimilating it into Alaska's kitchyass log cabin motif.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Look at the tenures of some of their senior architects and I.T.
| Leadership, and you might find that it coincides with the
| outdated-ness of their infrastructure and practices.
| alaskalol wrote:
| 100% agree on fiefdoms. The work is not hard, but if you're not
| a culture fit, you won't last more then a few years.
|
| I encourage you and anyone to apply, it's very _easy_ to get
| in, and the free travel is fun. Most if not all of Tech is
| remote and does not require any in office AFAIK. One thing
| though: They do not do cross collaboration and rather churn
| through new employees to set them up for failure and pin issues
| on whichever employee is leaving that month.
|
| Hawaiian though is not running anything "modern" except if you
| count SAAS as modern, their IT is pretty thin and older. Most
| of Alaska IT does very old things because people who encourage
| change aren't embrace. The team would say it's conservative and
| that usually is the safer answer, because when change does
| happen and it goes bad - what happened here is what everyone is
| afraid of. They will terminate/this is a resume generating
| event for this specific engineer in ITS. Anyone can verify this
| by going to LinkedIn, and reviewing the employees in IT/Tech.
| You'll see what I mean immediately. Everyone on AS and HA are
| on LinkedIn so recreating an orgchart and seeing techstacks are
| very, very obvious, you can also search previous job
| descriptions for job ads too.
|
| I'd like to be more specific, but I can't. Though to put
| prospective: in some examples if a plane is delayed at gate, it
| can be something as simple as SMTP broke, lol.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Of course not a word as to what they fucked up to cause this in
| the first place.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| are you surprised? We're not exactly heading in the
| transparency-first direction; quite the opposite.
| djoldman wrote:
| Not 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...
|
| :(
| indrora wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Looks like that's accurate. Deleting the png from the defs
| makes the svg 11kb.
| tencentshill wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| E-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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| Wow, Alaska paying peanuts for relatively mission critical
| software/SRE roles: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-
| airlines/salaries/so...
| titanomachy wrote:
| And in Seattle, where engineer salaries are among the highest
| in the country.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Southwest, Alaska, United, Delta you name it they are all WITCH
| outsourcing darlings. We have seen and will continue to see
| yearly outages.
| abetaha wrote:
| I 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.
| Lucian6 wrote:
| Having dealt with similar high-stakes outages in travel tech, the
| root cause here seems to be their dependency on Sabre's legacy
| mainframe systems. These ancient TPF (Transaction Processing
| Facility) systems, originally built by IBM in the 60s, are still
| running critical flight operations for many airlines. The
| challenge isn't just technical debt - it's that these systems are
| so deeply integrated that even a minor issue can cascade into a
| full ground stop.
|
| We ran into this when trying to modernize a smaller regional
| airline's booking system. The mainframe was processing 2000+ TPS
| with sub-second response times, but any attempt to gradually
| migrate services to modern infrastructure would break transaction
| atomicity. We ended up building a real-time event streaming layer
| with Apache Kafka as a bridge, maintaining eventual consistency
| while slowly moving services. Still took 18 months just for the
| booking component.
|
| The real solution probably requires a complete re-architecture of
| the airline industry's core reservation systems. But with
| billions in sunk costs and extreme reliability requirements
| (99.999% uptime), it's a massive undertaking that no single
| airline can tackle alone.
| alaskalol wrote:
| For 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_
| andrewl wrote:
| Many 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-con...
| Aloha wrote:
| TPF 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 wrote:
| My read of this: 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.
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