Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines experienced substantial operations disruptions on monday, december 3, as a result of technology problems impacting the company’s website, mobile application, and flights, most notably at the alaska airlines hub, seattle–tacoma international airport (sea). This incident is the second significant IT-related incident impacting the airline in the past couple of months following a similar disruption in September.
The trajectory of the tech crash coincided with Alaska Airlines’ Cyber Monday sale offer. Passengers also faced issues related to access to the airline’s web site and its app resulting in widespread poor experience. Customers have loudly complained about flight delays and cancellations, because of the negligence not to book or manage a booking system.
An announcement on Alaska Airlines’ website confirmed the issue, which stated service suspensions on its internet and call center websites. The problems went beyond the digital field, and involved the airline operations’ flight, requiring corrective action on the spot.
In an attempt to manage traffic throughput, Alaska Airlines sequentially implemented a transport ground stop temporal [temporal, temporal, temporal, temporal] in an effort to mitigate technical dysfunctions [technical]. This measure, though important, caused delays and interruptions to passengers and further aggravated it. At this time, airlines have not yet explained why the service did go down.
However, this is not the first time that Alaska Airlines has run into trouble of this sort. Work stoppages in September 2023 resulted in a ground stop at SEA and, subsequently, severe delays (94% delayed departures, on average 45 min delayed). While operations continued to a certain extent after sunset, these attempts revealed vulnerabilities in the airlines’ information and communications infrastructures.
It is clear that the recent problems of Southwest Airlines are a symptom of a larger trend of tech disruption in the global airline industry. Notable incidents in 2023 include:
Iterative disruptions in the Alaska Airlines sector can be largely used to represent an industry dependency on technology and vulnerability to IT failure. However, as the industry has continued to be digitized, less effective systems and contingency planning are going to be one of the most critical factors in minimizing the damage that a passenger suffers due to such events. Comments so far from Alaska Airlines regarding the events of the day have yet to be made, but passengers and spectators alike will be interested in the ways measures are put in place to prevent the future incident.