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.
For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.
Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out of their control and so no compensation is owed.
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.
Yea, they tend to deflect. Then you send email quoting laws and inform them that next email will be trough lawyers, and they pay out quick (personal experience)
In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the response I got was that I need to contact the marketing carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed & I only discovered it when I went to airport).
NEB in Finland is Traficom, but they don't handle individual complaints. Those handled by Consumer Advisory Services and European Consumer Center & these are residence based as far as I understand (I'm Finnish citizen but I don't live in EU).
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.
In my case, I filed a complaint with Iceland air regulatory authority, even though
I lived in canada at a time, and when I told Icelandair I had done that, they suddenly became very proactive.
There are also firms that handle all of this for you for a % (in the region of 20%). They validate the claim and threaten ti take the airline to court if they don’t pay out.
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.
Very common in Germany. Non-existant in Finland. Finnish consumer rights are very weak, they only work if the business cooperates[1]. Finnair is a state-owned company that acts like if they were legislation and courts themselves. I have avoided them as much as I can for many years.
[1] Probably the majority of businesses does. But shady used car dealers etc. and Finnair don't.
Although a pain, I've had great success by simply asking for "some form of compensation" for my delay. They're not going to offer you cash back, but you can then push them to give future flight credit. I've gotten $30-$150 on average depending on the value of the ticket purchased
The law is clear though, if the airline doesn't comply, raise a complaint with the regulatory body of the country they are located. Suddenly they become very friendly (been there, done that, got all the monies)
I literally had to sprint across LIS airport (past the tax-free refund counter I had business at) to make an alternate flight, after waiting in line for 3 hours.
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.
Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare
Fair enough. It's mostly the 'bigger' long-haul airlines I've seen complaints about. But I can also find anecdata about Ryanair too without much effort:
Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their stance immediately when I put the local office of civil aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the correct official local authority, and they'll do your right really quickly.
How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
Have you filed a complaint with the swiss air regulatory authority?
I did that when Icelandair didn't comply within the allowed timeframe and suddenly they were much more forthcoming.
In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect their statistics of delays!
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!
I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?
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.
If the first plane needs 3 hours to return to service, you delay the first group of passengers by 2 hours and the second group by one hour. There's no need to delay the rest of the day's flights when the plane is fixed.
The person hours of delay is still 2x200 + 1x200 = 600.
Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump admin in the US.
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.
That policy and a long delay I had going from Iceland to London made the whole airfare for the trip (canada to london and back) free.
I think I even made money.
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.
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.
$12 isn't even enough for a proper meal. It needs to be at least double that. Who in the right mind authorized that? How many customers of that airline were affect? Say it's 90k, that's trading a meager $1M for angrier customers and dozens of complains and bad reviews.
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.
> 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
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.
Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 30's nothing except radios and the planes.
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.
Most are - irony of irony is that when Delta had its big outage due to CrowdStrike, dealtamatic/deltaterm was still running just fine, but no one could get into it because all of their windows machines were locked out.
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.
excellent point. at tmobile (circa 2014) it required 87 APIs be hit to turn on a new subscriber. if the 34th API failed, the subscriber had to wait and start over clogging up the stores. at the core only 3 or 4 of those APIs were crucial to start the service and the rest could have been fine with eventual consistency. who is ticketed for what flight is the core, the rest dealing with plane can be handled manually just like the small airplanes do it, manual weight & balance, flight planning, etc. but Alaska chooses not to do that and is ok losing millions of dollars per day disrupted while losing customers because they do not care. and not hiring a safety officer for years proves they do not care.
I am by no means an industry insider, but I’m skeptical of your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps, but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required to compete on price in the modern era.
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.
I think the ticketing systems are probably the most modern parts of airlines. As far as I know, the tech that actually runs the plane does not change very often as it needs to go through approval processes.
The ticketing system might very well be the oldest.
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.
that was my point in the purposeful use of the word "fiefdom" to describe the Alaska IT culture. it wasn't focused on optimal infra state with what it had, it was focused on following the cult of the winders wizards that refused to acknowledge anything different like Linux.
The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry. American companies don't pay good salaries for people who specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire, and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because they won't pay experienced people to do this.
It can be developed. I think it’s more of an indictment of the type of company that doesn’t even consider changing anything not currently screaming bloody murder at them.
100% agree on fiefdoms. The work is not hard, but if you're not a culture fit, you won't last more then a few years.
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.
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.
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.)
yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse, with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.
Oof, Alaska 261 [1]. We say Boeing is bad now, but McDonnell-Douglas had a 30-year run of releasing model after model with catastrophic and foreseeable engineering defects. (Not to say that Alaska was not also extremely culpable in that incident too). In that light, the MCAS and door plug fiascos might just be Boeing trying to live up to the rich traditions they inherited from MD.
to make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".
i prefer to arrive to work fresh and not have smoked meth or fentanyl the entire train ride not to mention dodging random stabbings, homeless feces, and insane people that belong in a mental care facility.
Look at the tenures of some of their senior architects and I.T. Leadership, and you might find that it coincides with the outdated-ness of their infrastructure and practices.
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
What amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details.
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 ...
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:
I was curious why and the answer is stupider than you'd think:
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.
Maybe it's an easy way to speed up the page load if the boss ever asks them to. You have to carve out a few CYA options when working for a hostile manager.
E-comm team has the highest turn over, maybe it is an easy CYA fix, maybe they just followed whatever design said the logo should be. Great catch though.
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.
Interesting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
They ran a project to try to modernize that but it is still very far behind. Many certs are manually updated and only discovered broken when they expired and due to 2 year max on azure (or is it 18 months) it's happening more and more now.
this is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
Having dealt with similar high-stakes outages in travel tech, the root cause here seems to be their dependency on Sabre's legacy mainframe systems. These ancient TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) systems, originally built by IBM in the 60s, are still running critical flight operations for many airlines. The challenge isn't just technical debt - it's that these systems are so deeply integrated that even a minor issue can cascade into a full ground stop.
We ran into this when trying to modernize a smaller regional airline's booking system. The mainframe was processing 2000+ TPS with sub-second response times, but any attempt to gradually migrate services to modern infrastructure would break transaction atomicity. We ended up building a real-time event streaming layer with Apache Kafka as a bridge, maintaining eventual consistency while slowly moving services. Still took 18 months just for the booking component.
The real solution probably requires a complete re-architecture of the airline industry's core reservation systems. But with billions in sunk costs and extreme reliability requirements (99.999% uptime), it's a massive undertaking that no single airline can tackle alone.
TPF as far as I can tell has never caused an issue with downtime. When delta had their big outage deltamatic/deltaterm was still chugging along, but no one could log into it because all the windows machines were down.
For Alaska, that is not accurate. They did a complete migration off any on premise data center around 2023 for Sabre* there are on prem DC for other things but not for GDS.
Hawaiian uses Amadeus, so also not any intergration issue.
What happens and why Alaska usually has the most issues in October is it's PIP season, some people got culled. Also some new hires too.
This specific ITS though pushed through a change without proper CM/CAB earlier this week. But that's all I can write
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.
"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are:
- 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."
That's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
Ah, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
The confusion from people who declined to read the webpage?
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.
And conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
(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.
You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.
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.
> 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.
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"?
I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.
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.
> 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.)
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"?
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
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.
Well, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
The alternative is seeing a news report that says "Sabotage by hostile nation and/or terrorists not ruled out!" - obviously the airline will do root-cause analysis and find out who screwed the pooch.
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.
For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.
Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out of their control and so no compensation is owed.
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.
Yea, they tend to deflect. Then you send email quoting laws and inform them that next email will be trough lawyers, and they pay out quick (personal experience)
In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the response I got was that I need to contact the marketing carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed & I only discovered it when I went to airport).
So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.
Have you raised a complaint with the regulatory body they are registered to? That also works well.
NEB in Finland is Traficom, but they don't handle individual complaints. Those handled by Consumer Advisory Services and European Consumer Center & these are residence based as far as I understand (I'm Finnish citizen but I don't live in EU).
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.
In my case, I filed a complaint with Iceland air regulatory authority, even though I lived in canada at a time, and when I told Icelandair I had done that, they suddenly became very proactive.
There are also firms that handle all of this for you for a % (in the region of 20%). They validate the claim and threaten ti take the airline to court if they don’t pay out.
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.
Very common in Germany. Non-existant in Finland. Finnish consumer rights are very weak, they only work if the business cooperates[1]. Finnair is a state-owned company that acts like if they were legislation and courts themselves. I have avoided them as much as I can for many years.
[1] Probably the majority of businesses does. But shady used car dealers etc. and Finnair don't.
Although a pain, I've had great success by simply asking for "some form of compensation" for my delay. They're not going to offer you cash back, but you can then push them to give future flight credit. I've gotten $30-$150 on average depending on the value of the ticket purchased
If you have a working small claims court system in your country - go for that.
The law is clear though, if the airline doesn't comply, raise a complaint with the regulatory body of the country they are located. Suddenly they become very friendly (been there, done that, got all the monies)
I literally had to sprint across LIS airport (past the tax-free refund counter I had business at) to make an alternate flight, after waiting in line for 3 hours.
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.
Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare
Fair enough. It's mostly the 'bigger' long-haul airlines I've seen complaints about. But I can also find anecdata about Ryanair too without much effort:
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.
and “most claims aren’t successful”
The same is true of lottery tickets, yet that obviously hasn't stopped people from buying them.
Got compensations relatively easily out of both Wizzair and Ryanair and I loath bureaucracy.
Tell me about it. Swiss air refuses to pay out 1800€ in EC261 compensation…
Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their stance immediately when I put the local office of civil aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the correct official local authority, and they'll do your right really quickly.
They almost always try that. Save yourself the hassle, use one of the online services who will get that money for you.
Plenty of frequent flyers are willing to help for free too (I assume a majority of those services take a cut). FlyerTalk, Head For Points forums etc
How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
Had a cancelled flight with Swiss which they claimed was birdstrike and hence force majeur. So no compensation …
Have you filed a complaint with the swiss air regulatory authority? I did that when Icelandair didn't comply within the allowed timeframe and suddenly they were much more forthcoming.
In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect their statistics of delays!
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'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?
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.
> I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?
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?
If the first plane needs 3 hours to return to service, you delay the first group of passengers by 2 hours and the second group by one hour. There's no need to delay the rest of the day's flights when the plane is fixed.
The person hours of delay is still 2x200 + 1x200 = 600.
Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump admin in the US.
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.
That policy and a long delay I had going from Iceland to London made the whole airfare for the trip (canada to london and back) free. I think I even made money.
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.
Every flight I've taken in the last year has been a clusterfuck. I've spent damn near as much time in airports as I have in the air.
It seriously makes me not want to fly.
If only we had ever actually been serious about reviving passenger rail, then we wouldn't have 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.
The trick is to only have 14 hour flights. Then almost any delay will feel rather small by comparison.
See if you can get some miles out of it. Alaska miles are still some of the most valuable for using on international partners.
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.
$12 isn't even enough for a proper meal. It needs to be at least double that. Who in the right mind authorized that? How many customers of that airline were affect? Say it's 90k, that's trading a meager $1M for angrier customers and dozens of complains and bad reviews.
I had a similar delay and was given $24, which was enough for an entrée at an airport restaurant.
> which lightened the situation as it put into perspective how ridiculous the prices are at the airport.
Stop giving that kind of shit a pass by making "light" of it, what the hell
We're literally living a dystopia
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.
> 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
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.
Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 30's nothing except radios and the planes.
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.
Most are - irony of irony is that when Delta had its big outage due to CrowdStrike, dealtamatic/deltaterm was still running just fine, but no one could get into it because all of their windows machines were locked out.
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.
excellent point. at tmobile (circa 2014) it required 87 APIs be hit to turn on a new subscriber. if the 34th API failed, the subscriber had to wait and start over clogging up the stores. at the core only 3 or 4 of those APIs were crucial to start the service and the rest could have been fine with eventual consistency. who is ticketed for what flight is the core, the rest dealing with plane can be handled manually just like the small airplanes do it, manual weight & balance, flight planning, etc. but Alaska chooses not to do that and is ok losing millions of dollars per day disrupted while losing customers because they do not care. and not hiring a safety officer for years proves they do not care.
I am by no means an industry insider, but I’m skeptical of your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps, but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required to compete on price in the modern era.
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.
I think the ticketing systems are probably the most modern parts of airlines. As far as I know, the tech that actually runs the plane does not change very often as it needs to go through approval processes.
The ticketing system might very well be the oldest.
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.
that was my point in the purposeful use of the word "fiefdom" to describe the Alaska IT culture. it wasn't focused on optimal infra state with what it had, it was focused on following the cult of the winders wizards that refused to acknowledge anything different like Linux.
The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry. American companies don't pay good salaries for people who specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire, and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because they won't pay experienced people to do this.
Who pays better than American companies for well tested technology?
The drain is not to other countries, but to other technologies.
No one. GP is putting out bunk
He means they go to other companies.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...
It can be developed. I think it’s more of an indictment of the type of company that doesn’t even consider changing anything not currently screaming bloody murder at them.
100% agree on fiefdoms. The work is not hard, but if you're not a culture fit, you won't last more then a few years.
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.
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.
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.)
yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse, with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.
Nope, no snow in Seattle yesterday.
What gave you the impression that this happened yesterday?
Oof, Alaska 261 [1]. We say Boeing is bad now, but McDonnell-Douglas had a 30-year run of releasing model after model with catastrophic and foreseeable engineering defects. (Not to say that Alaska was not also extremely culpable in that incident too). In that light, the MCAS and door plug fiascos might just be Boeing trying to live up to the rich traditions they inherited from MD.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
to make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".
90 minutes? I live in south Seattle - Link from downtown Seattle takes half that. It's crazy to drive on I-5 and you don't have to.
i prefer to arrive to work fresh and not have smoked meth or fentanyl the entire train ride not to mention dodging random stabbings, homeless feces, and insane people that belong in a mental care facility.
Well I'm glad to tell you the train is pretty much packed with commuters so there isn't room for any of that!
Virgin America was the best airline in the US and they ruined it by assimilating it into Alaska's kitchyass log cabin motif.
Look at the tenures of some of their senior architects and I.T. Leadership, and you might find that it coincides with the outdated-ness of their infrastructure and practices.
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
What amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details.
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 ...
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...
:(
I was curious why and the answer is stupider than you'd think:
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.
Maybe it's an easy way to speed up the page load if the boss ever asks them to. You have to carve out a few CYA options when working for a hostile manager.
E-comm team has the highest turn over, maybe it is an easy CYA fix, maybe they just followed whatever design said the logo should be. Great catch though.
Looks like that's accurate. Deleting the png from the defs makes the svg 11kb.
For your convenience, some moron used the entire above-the-fold on a 16-in mbp to tell you what site you're on with a png.
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.
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.
No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.
Interesting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
They ran a project to try to modernize that but it is still very far behind. Many certs are manually updated and only discovered broken when they expired and due to 2 year max on azure (or is it 18 months) it's happening more and more now.
Are you saying that it isn’t always DNS?
this is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
If I'm managing a small company and I absolutely do not want to have this issue, what should I learn?
Autorotate everything
Thank you
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.
Having dealt with similar high-stakes outages in travel tech, the root cause here seems to be their dependency on Sabre's legacy mainframe systems. These ancient TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) systems, originally built by IBM in the 60s, are still running critical flight operations for many airlines. The challenge isn't just technical debt - it's that these systems are so deeply integrated that even a minor issue can cascade into a full ground stop.
We ran into this when trying to modernize a smaller regional airline's booking system. The mainframe was processing 2000+ TPS with sub-second response times, but any attempt to gradually migrate services to modern infrastructure would break transaction atomicity. We ended up building a real-time event streaming layer with Apache Kafka as a bridge, maintaining eventual consistency while slowly moving services. Still took 18 months just for the booking component.
The real solution probably requires a complete re-architecture of the airline industry's core reservation systems. But with billions in sunk costs and extreme reliability requirements (99.999% uptime), it's a massive undertaking that no single airline can tackle alone.
TPF as far as I can tell has never caused an issue with downtime. When delta had their big outage deltamatic/deltaterm was still chugging along, but no one could log into it because all the windows machines were down.
For Alaska, that is not accurate. They did a complete migration off any on premise data center around 2023 for Sabre* there are on prem DC for other things but not for GDS.
Hawaiian uses Amadeus, so also not any intergration issue.
What happens and why Alaska usually has the most issues in October is it's PIP season, some people got culled. Also some new hires too.
This specific ITS though pushed through a change without proper CM/CAB earlier this week. But that's all I can write
I enjoyed running around the Amdahl machines in the RAD building when I was a kid.
Many air traffic control systems are also running on old hardware and software, which can include floppy disks.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/nx-s1-5424682/air-traffic-con...
Wow, Alaska paying peanuts for relatively mission critical software/SRE roles: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...
And in Seattle, where engineer salaries are among the highest in the country.
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…
They’ve always been pretty bad but it feels worse post Hawaiian merger
Total non statement… the statement on the IT outage is that we had an IT outage.
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.
For reporting from people who were stuck on tarmacs across the PNW see:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
This is the other big thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AlaskaAirlines/comments/1oehxxv/who...
"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are:
- 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."
That's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori... It is on top of the page and linked a in it
Ah, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
The confusion from people who declined to read the webpage?
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.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
There’s a link at the top of Alaska Air’s home page. But your first thought was to go search Google instead?
The last sentence on the statement page contains a link to a "flexible travel policy" page, which contains the above quoted text.
Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information.
And conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
So, summing this all up:
(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.
You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.
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...
> 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.
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"?
I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.
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.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822
[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322
> 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.)
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"?
Was there any impact on the flights in air?
Several reported having to be diverted, and I think in one case a flight that left JFK had to return to JFK while over the midwest: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA31
> Several reported having to be diverted
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?
I'm guessing any/some/all of:
- 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
No flights were departing their gates in SEA so presumably it was turned around to avoid gridlock at SEA due to no gates available.
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
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.
Southwest, Alaska, United, Delta you name it they are all WITCH outsourcing darlings. We have seen and will continue to see yearly outages.
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?
Well, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
The alternative is seeing a news report that says "Sabotage by hostile nation and/or terrorists not ruled out!" - obviously the airline will do root-cause analysis and find out who screwed the pooch.
Of course not a word as to what they fucked up to cause this in the first place.
are you surprised? We're not exactly heading in the transparency-first direction; quite the opposite.