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Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

news.alaskaair.com

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Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#81

Post by indrora »

djoldman wrote: post #80

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: https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska... :(

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.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#82

Post by toast0 »

keyle wrote: post #53
croemer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR ( =1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.

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 replaced, your flight will go out on that (or whatever flight in the swapsies chain).

What alternative would you prefer:

a) Early flight has to wait, maximal delay for those passengers trading off with minimal delay for others

b) Something based on class of booking + airline status + time of booking, like they use for upgrades. Frequent fliers get minimal delay, ultra economy gets maximum delay

c) prefer passengers with connections that haven't yet been missed, otherwise a or b? Maybe just prefer passengers where makable connections avoid an overnight missed connection. This one makes systemic sense, but may not be easy to compute.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#83

Post by Schiendelman »

sandorscribbles wrote: post #68
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…

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"…

90 minutes? I live in south Seattle - Link from downtown Seattle takes half that. It's crazy to drive on I-5 and you don't have to.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#84

Post by 12_throw_away »

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…

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#85

Post by djoldman »

indrora wrote: post #81
djoldman wrote: post #80

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: https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska... :(

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.

Looks like that's accurate. Deleting the png from the defs makes the svg 11kb.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#86

Post by hexbin010 »

Macha wrote: post #46
hexbin010 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare

Fair enough. It's mostly the 'bigger' long-haul airlines I've seen complaints about. But I can also find anecdata about Ryanair too without much effort:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ryanair/2195574-how-get-ryan...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lg6aqp/ryan...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1d3908i/i_th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lnjmvm/file...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1o6muwv/ryan...

Every airline plays the game to some degree - it would be commercially incompetent to not use every possible angle to weasle out of it.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#87

Post by buzer »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #78
jddj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Yea, they tend to deflect. Then you send email quoting laws and inform them that next email will be trough lawyers, and they pay out quick (personal experience)

In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the response I got was that I need to contact the marketing carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed & I only discovered it when I went to airport).

So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#89

Post by bsimpson »

croemer wrote: post #16
tschwimmer wrote: post #10

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 happ…

For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR ( =1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.

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.

Re: Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage

#90

Post by coliveira »

bob1029 wrote: post #77
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…

> 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 l…

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.
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