Alaska Airways said Friday it has employed world consulting agency Accenture to conduct a full audit of its expertise programs, a part of a broader push to enhance reliability after two main IT outages in latest months. The evaluate will embrace a top-to-bottom examination of the airline’s programs, requirements, and processes.
The transfer follows a major outage final week that grounded flights for eight hours. The Seattle-based firm stated greater than 49,000 passengers had their journey plans disrupted and greater than 400 flights have been canceled throughout Alaska Airways and its subsidiary Horizon Air. The outage was extreme sufficient to postpone the corporate’s scheduled quarterly earnings name.
Alaska stated the outage was attributable to a failure at its main information heart and was not associated to a cybersecurity incident.
In a brand new regulatory filing, the airline stated it doesn’t plan on rescheduling its third quarter name and can present up to date steerage for its fourth quarter in early December, “as soon as the complete monetary impression of the latest IT disruptions is known.”
A separate July outage, caused by a failure of a “important piece of {hardware}” at Alaska’s information facilities, was anticipated to cut back earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.
Alaska stated it has boosted IT infrastructure spending by practically 80% since 2019, investing in redundant information facilities and migrating extra guest-facing programs to the cloud.
The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, mixing its personal information facilities with third-party cloud platforms, based on an interview final yr with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vp of IT.
Alaska started migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure round 2015 and continues to keep up its personal information facilities for important workloads, based on the interview.
Earlier this week, Alaska had one other IT disruption, however this time blamed Microsoft Azure, which itself had an outage that quickly disrupted operations for patrons worldwide. The disruption impacted Alaska’s subsidiary Hawaiian Airways.
