Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage(news.alaskaair.com) |
Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage(news.alaskaair.com) |
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.
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.
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.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
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.
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.
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.
It seriously makes me not want to fly.
Most intercity journeys in the US are the perfect distance for intercity or high speed rail, but the system has withered on the vine for so long.
Stop giving that kind of shit a pass by making "light" of it, what the hell
We're literally living a dystopia
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
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 ...
https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska...
:(
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
- 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."
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?
Can we really use the phrase "IT outage" as if it's an explaination in and of itself?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ryanair/2195574-how-get-ryan...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lg6aqp/ryan...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1d3908i/i_th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lnjmvm/file...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1o6muwv/ryan...
Every airline plays the game to some degree - it would be commercially incompetent to not use every possible angle to weasle out of it.
The same is true of lottery tickets, yet that obviously hasn't stopped people from buying them.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
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.
There’s a link at the top of Alaska Air’s home page. But your first thought was to go search Google instead?
- 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
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...
So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.
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.
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?
The person hours of delay is still 2x200 + 1x200 = 600.
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
(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.
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...
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.
I generally go direct to the airline these days but if I get pushback beyond what I’m willing to deal with myself, I’ll use one of those services.
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.
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.
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.
[1] Probably the majority of businesses does. But shady used car dealers etc. and Finnair don't.
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"?
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.
Not really; there are two issues, of which I think one supports you much more strongly than the other one does.
First (supporting you more), the French criminal law is a very large document. Appropriate referencing should include a more reliable way to find the relevant text than "it's in there somewhere".
Second, whether something is a crime according to any particular body of criminal law is generally a subjective question that cannot be definitively answered by reading the text of the law, even if you read it all. Because of this, appropriate referencing demands that you provide the text which you are interpreting to mean that the particular events under discussion constitute a crime.
This second point seems more important to me. If you say that's a crime according to the French criminal law, which states '[direct quote]', that's a good reference even though you don't specify where in the law your text is found. If you provide the location of the text you're thinking of, but not the text itself, that's a much worse reference, even though it's still better than just waving at "the French criminal law".
But part of that calculation is the fact that I expect, if I have a genuine quote in my hand, that I'll be able to locate where in the law it came from. Bodies of law are generally pretty good about this. Hundreds of years ago, specifying where in the law a direct quote occurred would have been more important.
(Issues with citing the law get even worse than this; judgments that postdate the law can have dramatic effects on its meaning without triggering any change in its official wording.)
> 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.
I wouldn't, but that's because the link specifies that it details Alaska Airlines' customer support policy. If the same thing happened in a Mayo Clinic page outlining their view of homeopathy, then that document would be making misleading statements about healthcare.
If a delayed passenger called Alaska Airlines and said "in your statement about the outage, it mentions that you reimburse affected passengers for any hotel accommodations they may have made without limitation" (and that is an accurate description of the mistakenly-linked outdated policy), do you think it would be more accurate for the representative to respond "yes, it does say that, but unfortunately that link goes to an outdated policy and we can't reimburse more than $100", or to respond "no, it doesn't say that. It only says that we have a policy, and our policy is to reimburse up to $100"?
