The airline told Network World that when the critical piece of what it described as “third-party multi-redundant hardware” failed unexpectedly, “it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations.” The company is currently working with its vendor to replace the faulty equipment at the data center.
The airline has cancelled more than 150 flights since Sunday evening, including 64 on Monday. The company said additional flight disruptions are likely as it repositions aircraft and crews throughout its network.
Alaska Airlines emphasized that the safety of its flights was never compromised, and that “the IT outage is not related to any other current events, and it’s not connected to the recent cybersecurity incident at Hawaiian Airlines.”
The airline did not provide additional information to Network World about the specifics of the outage.
“There are many redundant components that can fail,” said Roberts, noting that it could have been something as simple as a RAID array (which combines multiple physical data storage components into one or more logical units). Or, on the network side, it could have been the failure of a pair of load balancers.
“It’s interesting that redundancy didn’t save them,” said Roberts. “Perhaps multiple pieces of hardware were impacted by the same issue, like a firmware update. Or, maybe they’re just really unlucky.”
