A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse
July 2024 Delta 5 day outage
August 2025 United weight and balance outage
June 2025 American outage
October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
I was affected. Taking off now for a 5:30pm PT flight to Seattle. Aside from clearly not having an appropriate disaster readiness plan, communication was bad even though some information was readily available. For example, there was an inbound ground stop for KSEA for hours, but it was never announced to passengers. We were very lucky the crew was fresh, and there was no discussion of when they would time out. I happened to find out that the crew had lots of time left so I decided to stay but at least a dozen people gave up and left.
Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.
Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out of their control and so no compensation is owed.
Then you get the pleasure of a phone tree that only allows the option of giving feedback about the noise on the plane or the cleanliness.
Then once you get through and manage to plead your case you'll get quarterly emails about how your case is in review and sorry about the delay but you should have news next week.
Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare
In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect their statistics of delays!
Some other airlines "swap planes" and do swapsies with every passengers, on every flights, if they get a morning delay; they trickle it down all day long. It's ridiculous seeing lines of people moving to another gate, all day. When your plane arrive at your gate, you know you're being moved to another line and the delayed passengers will get your plane. So that way, delays stay within the bounds!
Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump admin in the US.
I believe the argument is that regulation encumbers airlines and, instead, the free market will incentivise participants to handle outages and delayed flights in a competitive way.
Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their stance immediately when I put the local office of civil aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the correct official local authority, and they'll do your right really quickly.
How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
Air travel sucks. [..] I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
Yes, this is what you get when people don't organize themselves politically. You get a fucking nightmare to live in.
I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work. (I am not the problem in this, because I try to be politically active when I have time, but humanity is just so fucking stupid that it's not even funny; I guess someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by death, because no good deed goes unpunished in this hell scape.)
> I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work.
Not stupid, just corrupt :)
If we did this, the money would get misappropriated or stolen - most likely completely legally through overpaid consulting fees.
So clearly we should pay someone to prevent that from happening.
I was affected as well. My IAH->SEA 7:10 PM Central flight took off 4 hours late. It’s 4 AM central and we’re just descending to land in Seattle. Communication from the airline was basically nonexistent and the poor ground crews didn’t get any information either. I thought we wouldn’t even take off because of crew time limits, but we were lucky to have a fresh one.
The system apparently came back and died several times before we could take off. We pushed away from the gate because the system was working and then had to wait on the tarmac for an hour because the system was down again.
Not a fun day for air travelers.
Has anyone else noticed their website has been having a ton of issues in the last few weeks as well? In terms of bookings failing and trips not appearing? Just my anecdote but software issues seem to have become very frequent over there…
Interesting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
this is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are:
- providing hotel accommodations;
- arranging for ground transportation;
- providing meal vouchers; and
- arranging for air transportation on another air carrier or foreign air carrier to the passenger’s destination; as appropriate, based on your circumstances."
That's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
Ah, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
The confusion from people who declined to read the webpage?
Most people will read both the comment and webpage, or neither. In either case there's no problem.
It's only your uncommon case of reading the comment, not reading the webpage, and yet still feeling confident in making assertions about the webpage contents, where there's an issue. But that's not common, and I daresay the issue is not on OP's end.
And conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
(1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part;
(2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation";
(3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source.
That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.
You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.
Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
> I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred documents, or just one?
The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on the page as being the airline's policy toward affected "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have found it, because... it's included in the document. It's not like the quote was pulled from the "investor relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the generic site-wide topbar for no reason.
Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.
Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy is in place to support their guests?
If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct link to the correct policy as being "part of the document"?
I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.
No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I would find it confusing.
As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to admit that I don't have much experience with them, but from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I would not consider the whole book to be a single document when it comes to referencing. Would it make sense to say something like "The adventure in the book ends with you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of the many alternative endings, one that many might not encounter when playing?
And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)
The other example is interesting. I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.
Well, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse July 2024 Delta 5 day outage August 2025 United weight and balance outage June 2025 American outage October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
I was affected. Taking off now for a 5:30pm PT flight to Seattle. Aside from clearly not having an appropriate disaster readiness plan, communication was bad even though some information was readily available. For example, there was an inbound ground stop for KSEA for hours, but it was never announced to passengers. We were very lucky the crew was fresh, and there was no discussion of when they would time out. I happened to find out that the crew had lots of time left so I decided to stay but at least a dozen people gave up and left.
Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.
Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out of their control and so no compensation is owed.
Then you get the pleasure of a phone tree that only allows the option of giving feedback about the noise on the plane or the cleanliness.
Then once you get through and manage to plead your case you'll get quarterly emails about how your case is in review and sorry about the delay but you should have news next week.
Not bitter.
Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare
In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect their statistics of delays!
Some other airlines "swap planes" and do swapsies with every passengers, on every flights, if they get a morning delay; they trickle it down all day long. It's ridiculous seeing lines of people moving to another gate, all day. When your plane arrive at your gate, you know you're being moved to another line and the delayed passengers will get your plane. So that way, delays stay within the bounds!
Sickening, I'm never flying these airlines again.
Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump admin in the US.
I believe the argument is that regulation encumbers airlines and, instead, the free market will incentivise participants to handle outages and delayed flights in a competitive way.
Tell me about it. Swiss air refuses to pay out 1800€ in EC261 compensation…
They almost always try that. Save yourself the hassle, use one of the online services who will get that money for you.
Plenty of frequent flyers are willing to help for free too (I assume a majority of those services take a cut). FlyerTalk, Head For Points forums etc
Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their stance immediately when I put the local office of civil aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the correct official local authority, and they'll do your right really quickly.
Had a cancelled flight with Swiss which they claimed was birdstrike and hence force majeur. So no compensation …
How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work. (I am not the problem in this, because I try to be politically active when I have time, but humanity is just so fucking stupid that it's not even funny; I guess someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by death, because no good deed goes unpunished in this hell scape.)
> they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that
Which would just flow into the pockets of ClownStrike or some big consultancy and nothing would actually change.
> I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work.
Not stupid, just corrupt :)
If we did this, the money would get misappropriated or stolen - most likely completely legally through overpaid consulting fees.
So clearly we should pay someone to prevent that from happening.
Wait a minute...
Just by forcing to compensate passengers accordingly they would start to care more.
What is the lost productivity for having so many people waiting on airports?
But that is consumer protection regulation and it is not going to happen in America in a few years
> someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by death
Why do you think we add iodine to salt?
Mind control?
No, that's what the fluorine in the water is for
I was affected as well. My IAH->SEA 7:10 PM Central flight took off 4 hours late. It’s 4 AM central and we’re just descending to land in Seattle. Communication from the airline was basically nonexistent and the poor ground crews didn’t get any information either. I thought we wouldn’t even take off because of crew time limits, but we were lucky to have a fresh one. The system apparently came back and died several times before we could take off. We pushed away from the gate because the system was working and then had to wait on the tarmac for an hour because the system was down again. Not a fun day for air travelers.
Total non statement… the statement on the IT outage is that we had an IT outage.
Has anyone else noticed their website has been having a ton of issues in the last few weeks as well? In terms of bookings failing and trips not appearing? Just my anecdote but software issues seem to have become very frequent over there…
No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.
Interesting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
Are you saying that it isn’t always DNS?
this is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
For reporting from people who were stuck on tarmacs across the PNW see:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are:
- providing hotel accommodations;
- arranging for ground transportation;
- providing meal vouchers; and
- arranging for air transportation on another air carrier or foreign air carrier to the passenger’s destination; as appropriate, based on your circumstances."
That's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori... It is on top of the page and linked a in it
Ah, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
The confusion from people who declined to read the webpage?
Most people will read both the comment and webpage, or neither. In either case there's no problem.
It's only your uncommon case of reading the comment, not reading the webpage, and yet still feeling confident in making assertions about the webpage contents, where there's an issue. But that's not common, and I daresay the issue is not on OP's end.
The last sentence on the statement page contains a link to a "flexible travel policy" page, which contains the above quoted text.
Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information.
And conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
So, summing this all up:
(1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part;
(2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation";
(3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source.
That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.
You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.
Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
[1] https://news.alaskaair.com/on-the-record/alaska-statement-on...
[2] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori...
> I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred documents, or just one?
The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on the page as being the airline's policy toward affected "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have found it, because... it's included in the document. It's not like the quote was pulled from the "investor relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the generic site-wide topbar for no reason.
Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.
Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy is in place to support their guests?
If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct link to the correct policy as being "part of the document"?
I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.
No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I would find it confusing.
As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to admit that I don't have much experience with them, but from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I would not consider the whole book to be a single document when it comes to referencing. Would it make sense to say something like "The adventure in the book ends with you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of the many alternative endings, one that many might not encounter when playing?
And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)
The other example is interesting. I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822
[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322
How exactly does an IT outage occur yet not be linked to any "other events?"
Can we really use the phrase "IT outage" as if it's an explaination in and of itself?
Well, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
Was there any impact on the flights in air?
Several reported having to be diverted, and I think in one case a flight that left JFK had to return to JFK while over the midwest: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA31
> Several reported having to be diverted
How does that work? What is it about a computer outage in your parent company that affects whether you're able to make an already-scheduled landing?
I'm guessing any/some/all of:
- Whether parent company has the capacity to service your plane at the landing location
- Whether parent company has the capacity to handle boarding new passengers for the next flight at landing location
- Whether parent company can get next flight off the ground from landing location
- "Risk" management by sending planes and passengers where parent company thinks it has better ability to recover to normal operations
- And probably a bunch more only people who work in that industry would think of
No flights were departing their gates in SEA so presumably it was turned around to avoid gridlock at SEA due to no gates available.
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.