Huge Microsoft outage takes down Xbox, Minecraft and more Microsoft Azure has experienced a major outage, taking down internet services both inside and outside of the company. DownDetector is seeing a major spike in outage reports for Microsoft services, including Minecraft, Xbox, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Teams, and more. There are also outage complaints for […]
Alaska Airlines already tried to shore up its IT infrastructure after an outage in July forced the Seattle-based company to ground flights across the country.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough.
Alaska was hit with another major outage on Thursday, leading to a ground stop that lasted eight hours and resulted in more than 400 flights canceled across Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon Air.
In a new update Friday afternoon, the company said more than 49,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted.
The outage was severe enough to postpone the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings call Friday. Shares were down more than 6%.
Alaska said it was still working to normalize operations.
The company has blamed the outage on a failure at its primary data center. It was not due to a cybersecurity incident.
“Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems, but this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability,” the company said in its latest update. “We are immediately bringing in outside technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure to ensure we are as resilient as we need to be. ”
It added: “The reliability of our technology is fundamental to our ability to serve guests and get them to where they need to be.”
Alaska said its July outage was caused by a failure of a “critical piece of hardware” at its data centers.
The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms, according to an interview last year with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vice president of IT.
Alaska began migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure around 2015 and continues to maintain its own data centers for critical workloads, according to the interview.
The company last year partnered with Google Cloud on a generative AI-powered search experience.
The impact of this week’s outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.
Alaska said Friday it does not have an estimate of the financial impact of the outage. The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.
Alaska said the July outage was expected to reduce earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.
The company on Thursday reported third quarter revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.
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Travelers at Sea-Tac Airport try to find their luggage following a major outage at Alaska Airlines that began Thursday afternoon. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Alaska Airlines is still working to restore operations following a major outage that forced the Seattle-based company to cancel more than 360 flights on Alaska and its subsidiary Horizon Air.
The outage began Thursday around 3:30 p.m. PT. Alaska grounded planes across the U.S. as it addressed what it described as a “significant IT outage.”
In a statement, Alaska said a “failure occurred at our primary data center.” The outage was not a cybersecurity incident, according to the company.
“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” Alaska said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”
The ground stop was lifted at 11:30 p.m. PT Thursday, but the company is still actively addressing operational impacts that resulted from the disruption.
The company canceled its planned third quarter earnings call on Friday. “We do not yet have an estimate of the financial impact of the operational disruption on our fourth quarter results,” Alaska said in a regulatory filing. The company reported revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.
The impact of the outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.
The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.
An Alaska Airlines plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Updated at 8:40 p.m. Pacific.
Alaska Airlines said it’s recovering from an IT outage and “actively restoring operations” as of 7 p.m. Thursday after grounding flights across the U.S. for about three hours.
In a statement sent to GeekWire, Alaska said the outage began around 3:30 p.m. PT with a failure at the company’s primary data center.
“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” the company said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”
The outage was not a cybersecurity event or related to other events, according to Alaska.
Flights are resuming but passengers at some airports are facing long delays as they await inbound planes.
During the outage, passengers on Reddit reported that some planes were sitting on the tarmac or de-boarding. Customers also reported issues with the company’s app and website.
It was Alaska’s second outage in three months. The Seattle-based airline grounded flights after an outage in July that lasted about three hours.
Alaska Airlines is experiencing an IT outage affecting operations. A temporary ground stop is in place. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you're scheduled to fly tonight, please check your flight status before heading to the airport.
100 fewer Alaska Airlines aircraft in the air now compared to last week as the airline is experiencing an IT outage this evening. Some flights are now departing, but a delays will be felt for some time to come. pic.twitter.com/zIkJTTETiz
A detailed explanation of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage, released Thursday morning, confirms that it wasn’t a hardware glitch or an outside attack but a complex, cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems.
The company said a “faulty automation” in its internal systems — two independent programs that began racing each other to update records — erased key network entries for its DynamoDB database service, triggering a domino effect that temporarily broke many other AWS tools.
AWS said it has turned off the flawed automation worldwide and will fix the bug before bringing it back online. The company also plans to add new safety checks and improve how quickly its systems recover if something similar happens again.
Amazon apologized and acknowledged the widespread disruption caused by the outage.
“While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses,” the company said, promising to learn from the incident.
The outage began early Monday and impacted sites and online services around the world, again illustrating the internet’s deep reliance on Amazon’s cloud and showing how a single failure inside AWS can quickly ripple across the web.
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