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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
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.
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 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.
It seriously makes me not want 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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Stop giving that kind of shit a pass by making "light" of it, what the hell
We're literally living a dystopia
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.)
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
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
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 ...
https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska...
:(
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.