Alaska Airlines faced issues with some of its “key systems” due to the global outage of Microsoft’s Azure platform, the airline announced on Oct. 29.
It marks the third tech-induced disruption to its services this year, following an IT outage on Oct. 23 and another in July.
“For our guests who are unable to check in online due to the Microsoft Azure outage, please see an agent at the airport for a boarding pass, and allow for some extra time in the lobby. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue.”
“We are bringing impacted systems back online this afternoon, with other services set to resume once Microsoft resolves the issue from its end,” the statement added.
The same day, JetBlue Airways also flagged that its passengers traveling through Orlando International Airport (MCO) may experience longer-than-normal check-in times due to an IT issue.
Shares of Alaska Airlines were down 2.2 percent in afternoon trading on Oct. 29, with JetBlue also suffering a 1.3 percent drop.
Microsoft Azure said late on Oct. 29 that it had resolved the outage of the cloud platform.
“Customer configuration changes to AFD remain temporarily blocked. We will notify customers once this block has been lifted. While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues, and we are still working to mitigate this long tail. Updates will be provided directly via Azure Service Health.”
Microsoft Azure added that the incident lasted for more than 8 hours and was triggered by “a faulty tenant configuration deployment process.”
On July 20, the company briefly grounded all its flights for roughly three hours following an IT outage.
It was also forced to ground its entire fleet in April 2024 to address an issue with a system that calculates the weight and balance of its planes.
In June, Hawaiian Airlines, which is owned by Alaska Air Group, said some of its IT systems were disrupted by a hack. Alaska Air Group said it is still working to determine the financial impact of that incident.
Alaska Air Group maintains an operational fleet of four Boeing 787s, 34 Airbus A330s, 18 Airbus A321s, 244 Boeing 737s, 19 Boeing 717s, and 89 Embraer 175s, according to the company’s website.
The AWS outage began early on Oct. 20 and rippled through major consumer and enterprise platforms. About three hours after the outage began, Amazon reported the service was starting to recover. It wasn’t until around 6 p.m. ET that the company reported “services returned to normal operations.”
Reports on Downdetector throughout the day showed widespread outages on Amazon, Coinbase, Ring, Snapchat, Reddit, Slack, United Airlines, Zoom, and multiple online gaming networks, including Fortnite, Roblox, Pokémon Go, and the Epic Games services.
