Alaska Air phones a friend to find out what caused massive October outage

Accenture to poke around the beleaguered airline's IT infrastructure

Alaska Airlines has called in consultants to advise it on what went wrong during a late October IT meltdown that grounded flights and wreaked havoc for two days.

According to the group, the company has increased its investments in IT by almost 80 percent since 2019, "investing in redundant datacenters and moving many guest-facing systems to the cloud."

This will come as great comfort to its passengers who were left stranded following what the company called "a significant IT outage." The outage resulted in a system-wide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon-operated flights, affecting the travel plans of nearly 50,000 customers. The outage occurred on Thursday, October 23, and it was not until Saturday, October 25, that things returned to normal.

The group's claim to have invested in redundant datacenters will raise an eyebrow or two, since it was a borkage at the company's primary datacenter that caused things to go wrong in the first place. Having redundant datacenters would, we assume, have made a failover a relatively straightforward thing rather than having systems down for hours while staff scrambled.

Alaska Airlines acknowledged the issues, noting "this level of performance is not acceptable."

"Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems, but this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability."

The airline's fleet was grounded in July due to another unspecified IT issue. The company did not provide further details when asked by The Register for how much the 80 percent increase actually meant, or what it meant by "redundant datacenters." We do not think the phrase means what Alaska Airlines thinks it means.

Calling the IT failures "challenges," the company said Group President and CEO Ben Minicucci had "outlined the steps being taken to strengthen the company’s infrastructure and ensure long-term system reliability."

These steps include calling in the consultants, in this case Accenture, to audit the company's IT infrastructure and come up with a list of things the company can do quickly to stop the next outage before it can take down the network yet again and sully what the company calls "a world-class guest experience."

In terms of cloud systems, several of Alaska Airlines' services are hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. The company joined other Microsoft customers in suffering an outage last week when Azure experienced a failure after an "inadvertent tenant configuration change." Alaska Airlines, however, was able to stand up its backup infrastructure, allowing customers to book and check in for flights.

Accenture, therefore, has its work cut out for it. Not only are Alaska Air Group's internal systems evidently a little wobbly, but it also has cloud dependencies that can be occasionally unreliable.

Alaska Air Group said it "will provide updated guidance for the fourth quarter in early December, once the full financial impact of the recent IT disruptions is understood." Presumably, this will also coincide with Accenture dropping some early feedback and recommendations from its analysis. ®