With this being the third major IT outage this year, it’s estimated that Alaska Airlines may have incurred a cost of well over $40 million. IT outages are a relatively rare but extremely disruptive occurrence, and airlines place heavy emphasis on remedying these incidents as soon as they occur. Simple Flying reached out to Alaska Airlines for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
Alaska Airlines’ Third IT Outage
A global Microsoft outage on October 29 crippled several of Alaska Airlines’ and Hawaiian Airlines’ systems and website functions. This outage affected key Microsoft services worldwide, including Office 365 and certain video games, so this wasn’t an issue exclusive to Alaska. For the airline, the outage of the Microsoft Azure platform meant that several key services hosted on the platform were unavailable, causing mass disruption.
Guests found themselves unable to check in online for their flights and were directed to check-in desks, leading to massive lines that caused many passengers to miss their flights. Additionally, the outage temporarily shut down Alaska’s and Hawaiian’s website and app, although these have now been restored with some limited functionality. Simple Flying reached out for comment but has not yet received a response.
Alaska Airlines has been providing updates on the current outage on its website, with its most recent update coming at 15:50 Pacific Time. It reads,
“A global outage impacted the Microsoft Azure platform today where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, causing a disruption to key systems, including our websites.
Our teams worked quickly to stand up our backup infrastructure to allow our guests to book and check-in for their flights online while minimizing operational disruptions.
We are bringing impacted systems back online this afternoon, with other services set to resume once Microsoft resolves the issue from its end.
We apologize for any inconvenience that our guests might have experienced today and appreciate their patience as we navigated this issue.”
Two More Outages Earlier This Year
In July, Alaska Airlines suffered an IT outage that grounded its fleet for three hours. Whereas the outage on October 29 was a worldwide Microsoft issue that impacted multiple companies as well as individuals, the July incident was due to a hardware malfunction at one of the carrier’s data centers. This caused four days of delayed flights and roughly 200 cancellations, costing $17 million.
On October 23, another IT outage resulted in roughly 400 cancellations after the airline’s fleet was grounded for eight hours. This incident was caused by a failure at Alaska’s primary data center and is estimated to have cost Alaska Airlines $26 million, with operations returning to normal after two days. Over 50,000 people were impacted by this incident.
Alaska reportedly brought in outside help on how to revise its IT systems to prevent such failures. It’s unclear whether these two incidents were connected, but both resulted in mass operational disruption and impacted huge numbers of passengers. In comparison, the latest outage was due to an issue with a third party and appears to have had a far smaller operational impact.
The Impact Of These IT Outages
As the two companies have merged, the issues that impact Alaska Airlines also impact Hawaiian Airlines. As such, this greatly expands the areas in which operational disruptions from cancelled flights occur, as aircraft have to be rerouted and crews time out, requiring replacement.
Financially, Alaska Airlines has to compensate passengers and provide accommodations or rebook them on other carriers. Combined, the first two outages may have cost Alaska Airlines a combined total of roughly $43 million, a number that is sure to go up with this latest incident (though not by much, given the smaller impact). This has severely eaten into the carrier’s earnings and caused its stock to slide down.
|
Airline |
Hubs |
|---|---|
|
Alaska Airlines |
Seattle, Anchorage, Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco |
|
Hawaiian Airlines |
Honolulu, Kahului |
For passengers, operational reliability is one of the most important metrics when choosing which airline to fly. These incidents may give some passengers that Alaska Airlines is not reliable, and the company will surely make adjustments to prevent this image. Otherwise, it could have trouble attracting new customers or with charging its desired fares.
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