Alaska Airlines said Friday it has hired global consulting firm Accenture to conduct a full audit of its technology systems, part of a broader push to improve reliability after two major IT outages in recent months. The review will include a top-to-bottom examination of the airline’s systems, standards, and processes.
The move follows a major outage last week that grounded flights for eight hours. The Seattle-based company said more than 49,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted and more than 400 flights were canceled across Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon Air. The outage was severe enough to postpone the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings call.
Alaska said the outage was due to a failure at its primary data center and was not related to a cybersecurity incident.
In a new regulatory filing, the airline said it does not plan on rescheduling its third quarter call and will provide updated guidance for its fourth quarter in early December, “once the full financial impact of the recent IT disruptions is understood.”
A separate July outage, caused by a failure of a “critical piece of hardware” at Alaska’s data centers, was expected to reduce earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.
Alaska said it has boosted IT infrastructure spending by nearly 80% since 2019, investing in redundant data centers and migrating more guest-facing systems to the cloud.
The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms, according to an interview last year with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vice president of IT.
Alaska began migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure around 2015 and continues to maintain its own data centers for critical workloads, according to the interview.
Earlier this week, Alaska had another IT disruption, but this time blamed Microsoft Azure, which itself had an outage that temporarily disrupted operations for customers worldwide. The disruption impacted Alaska’s subsidiary Hawaiian Airlines.
