An outage that impacted Alaska Airlines’ flights for three hours was attributed to a hardware failure rather than a security incident. The airline confirmed that a piece of multi-redundant hardware, supplied by a third-party vendor, unexpectedly malfunctioned, affecting various operational systems.
Initially, some speculated that the outage might have been caused by a cyberattack, particularly in light of a recent incident involving Hawaiian Airlines, which Alaska Airlines acquired. This incident coincided with warnings from Microsoft about active attacks targeting its SharePoint servers, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in the aviation industry.
This outage highlights that even systems designed with redundancy can fail unexpectedly. Alaska Airlines emphasized the significance of their redundancy efforts, stating, “We anticipated this with redundant systems and were still impacted!” commented Jeremy Roberts, a senior director at Info-Tech Research Group.
At approximately 8 p.m. Pacific time on July 20, the airline announced the IT outage, resulting in a system-wide ground stop of flights. This stop lasted until 11 p.m. The failure of the third-party hardware impacted multiple key systems essential for operations, prompting the airline to work with its vendor to address the faulty equipment.
The outage led to the cancellation of over 150 flights since its inception, with further disruptions anticipated as the airline repositions aircraft and crews. Alaska Airlines assured that passenger safety was never compromised and that the IT outage was unrelated to the Hawaiian Airlines cybersecurity incident.
Roberts noted that various redundant components can fail, stressing that even a simple issue like a RAID array malfunction or load balancer failure could be responsible. He found it intriguing that redundancy failed to prevent the outage, suggesting that multiple hardware pieces might have been affected by the same problem.
Though the airline has not disclosed the financial implications of the outage, experts suggest it could cost millions, with a definitive assessment only possible if Alaska Airlines provides a detailed report following the incident.
This situation emphasizes the necessity for businesses to invest in and manage redundancy effectively. Companies should ensure that service-critical systems have active configurations for real-time failover to minimize disruptions. Redundancy is crucial; many successful enterprises, like Netflix, actively test their systems for fault tolerance to ensure reliability under various circumstances. Ultimately, as the Alaska Airlines incident exemplifies, there are significant stakes involved in maintaining robust IT infrastructure.
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