HN Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.

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.

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.

For reporting from people who were stuck on tarmacs across the PNW see:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...

Southwest, Alaska, United, Delta you name it they are all WITCH outsourcing darlings. We have seen and will continue to see yearly outages.

Was there any impact on the flights in air?

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?

Of course not a word as to what they fucked up to cause this in the first place.

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.

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...

:(

The 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.

Wow, Alaska paying peanuts for relatively mission critical software/SRE roles: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...

Total non statement… the statement on the IT outage is that we had an IT outage.

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…

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.