U.S carrier Alaska Airlines has experienced a major IT outage following its cyber Monday deal. The airline suffered greatly, with the outage causing flights to be delayed and even cancelled. Alaskan Airlines has said it deeply apologies to all of its affected customers, saying they suffered a “significant operational disruption”.
It’s understood that the airline first noticed the problem on the morning of Monday, December 2, 2024, after its website crashed. Following from this, the outage reportedly caused widespread service distributions across the entire airline. This lead to customers being unable to book tickets and even caused issues with scheduled services.
The resulting chaos caused the airline to enforce a 40-minute-long ground stop at its hub in Seattle-Tacoma internal Airports (SEA) for safety reasons and ease the aircraft congestion.
After what was a record breaking period for U.S airlines during the thanksgiving period, this was not the outcome travellers would have hoped for when returning home.
Via social media and other public forms the airline in a statement said: “We sincerely apologize to our guests who are impacted and are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,”
Another IT Outage
This is not the first time that the airline has suffered an IT problem which caused disruptions to its flight operations. In September 2024, the carrier encountered another IT outage that also caused major flight disruptions, with customers struggling once again, to buy tickets and check-in for flights. The outage in September also caused a ground stop to be implemented, which caused major delays at Seattle-Tacoma airport.
With what has been a hard year for Alaska Airlines, this is not the end of the year finish they will have wanted, from problems causing 737 MAX planes to be grounded for further inspections, IT outages, and flight delays, the airline will be keen to put the issues of 2024 behind them.
It is understood that while the airlines website is now live and that flights are operating normally again, passengers have been advised to check the status of their flights before heading to the airport. The airline had expected all services to return to normal by the evening of December 2.
Time To Focus On IT Infostructure?
While the issue was limited to just Alaska Airlines over the start of this week, this is yet another major IT issue to strike a U.S airline, with crowd strikes IT failure earlier this year, Seattle-Tacoma being cyber attacked, and Southwest’s IT problem, the question now moves to weather airlines need to focus on updating their IT infostructure to meet the new consumer demands.
Airlines often focus on revamping their services and fleets, but with the focus on a digital world becoming more prevalent each day, should they focus on making major IT updates and invest and focus heavily on these items. It’s not uncommon even in the year 2024, for airlines Apps to stop working, websites to crash and even boarding to be disrupted as the demand for air travel continues to grow.
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