Alaska Airlines to review IT systems after 2 outages in four months

After two hugely disruptive IT outages in four months, Alaska Airlines is bringing in outside experts to review its entire information technology infrastructure.

In July, an unexpected hardware failure at one of Alaska’s data centers grounded the airline’s fleet for three hours, kicking off four days of flight disruptions. That piece of hardware was multiredundant, Alaska said at the time, meaning both the hardware and its backup failed.

Then, on Thursday, another failure at Alaska’s “primary” data center grounded the airline’s fleet for roughly eight hours, forcing the cancellation of more than 400 flights Thursday and Friday, and impacting 49,000 passengers as of Friday afternoon.

“We know our guests put their trust in us when they choose to fly with Alaska, and this level of performa