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Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

news.alaskaair.com

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Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#121

Post by michaelt »

toast0 wrote: post #82
keyle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable? I show up for a flight to Mordor scheduled departure at 8 am, you for a scheduled departure at 9:30 am. The plane scheduled for the 8 am departure is unavailable (for whatever reason) and there's a plane that can board for a 9:30 departure... Shouldn't I get preference since my flight was scheduled to leave earlier? When the other plane becomes available or is repla…

> I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?

Imagine a route with 6 planes a day, 2 hours apart. The first flight of the day develops a problem that'll take 3 hours to repair.

Is it better to delay one plane by 3 hours; pay 200 passengers compensation; and waste 3x200=600 person-hours?

Or to delay six planes by 2 hours; pay no compensation as only 3+ hour delays get compensation; and waste 6x2x200=2400 person-hours?

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#123

Post by alaskalol »

Lucian6 wrote: post #122

[dead]

For Alaska, that is not accurate. They did a complete migration off any on premise data center around 2023 for Sabre* there are on prem DC for other things but not for GDS.

Hawaiian uses Amadeus, so also not any intergration issue.

What happens and why Alaska usually has the most issues in October is it's PIP season, some people got culled. Also some new hires too.

This specific ITS though pushed through a change without proper CM/CAB earlier this week. But that's all I can write

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#124

Post by alaskalol »

Hilift wrote: post #26

No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.

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.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#126

Post by azov »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #108
pgwhalen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am by no means an industry insider, but I’m skeptical of your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps, but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required to compete on price in the modern era. It’s easy to complain about modern air…

I think the ticketing systems are probably the most modern parts of airlines. As far as I know, the tech that actually runs the plane does not change very often as it needs to go through approval processes.

The ticketing system might very well be the oldest.

AFAIK the very first large-scale commercial deployment of what we now call "distributed cloud apps" was SABRE, a ticket reservation system built back in 1960s, still in use today.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#127

Post by alaskalol »

sandorscribbles wrote: post #67

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 wa…

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.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#128

Post by BeetleB »

celeritascelery wrote: post #104
coliveira wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

Who pays better than American companies for well tested technology?

He means they go to other companies.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/alaska-airlines/salaries/so...

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#129

Post by alaskalol »

tencentshill wrote: post #91
indrora wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

E-comm team has the highest turn over, maybe it is an easy CYA fix, maybe they just followed whatever design said the logo should be. Great catch though.
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