Alaska Air phones a friend to find out what caused massive October outage

Alaska Airlines has called in consultants to advise it on what went wrong during a late October IT meltdown that grounded flights and wreaked havoc for two days.

According to the group, the company has increased its investments in IT by almost 80 percent since 2019, "investing in redundant datacenters and moving many guest-facing systems to the cloud."

This will come as great comfort to its passengers who were left stranded following what the company called "a significant IT outage." The outage resulted in a system-wide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon-operated flights, affecting the travel plans of nearly 50,000 customers. The outage occurred on Thursday, October 23, and it was not until Saturday, October 25, that things returned to normal.

The group's claim to have invested in redundant datacenters will raise an eyebrow or two, since it was a borkage at the company's primary datacenter that ...