Thankfully they only sufffered two outages in 2025. And now it has flown in experts to play with configurations
Alaska Air's CEO says IT outages last year damaged the company on multiple fronts despite "triple redundancies" built into its disaster recovery plan.
The airline's systems failed twice in 2025 - once in July and again in October - forcing Alaska to ground its fleet on both occasions. Tech failures led to hundreds of flight cancellations.
On a conference call with analysts at the end of last week, CEO Benito Minicucci addressed what the company learned from its IT audit and how it plans to prevent future outages.
"The two outages we experienced last year were painful for our guests, employees and financial results," he said. "It's not for a lack of investment. We were investing in IT. I think it was more of a configuration. We had hardware failures. We had backup systems and triple redundancies that didn't kick in."
A failure at Alaska's primary datacenter in October knocked out operational systems and grounded planes, it said at the time.
The airline has now brought in third-party experts to "really understand how to take this investment we're making... to really address the configuration of our infrastructure so that we stay resilient to a high degree."
"Corrective actions are underway and will continue throughout the year, supported by third-party experts as we invest in both near-term fixes and long-term sustainable solutions," Minicucci said.
The outages carried financial consequences. Passenger revenue rose just 2 percent year-over-year in Q4 to $3.25 billion, while net income dropped to $20 million from $71 million a year earlier.
Minicucci said that financial results were "impacted by the IT outage, elevated fuel costs and the impact from government shutdowns."
Alaska's longer-term plans may include migrating to cloud computing. "If there's migration to the cloud and stuff, we'll get you guys up to speed on what we're doing," he told analysts.
Phew. Thank goodness the cloud never goes down. Maybe Alaska Airline should be safe and work with three providers. ®